Neil Young’s best albums, ranked and reviewed! 1968-1975 | Part 1 — State of Sound

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Neil Young’s greatest albums ranked and reviewed! 1968-1975 | Part 1

From his pristine eponymous debut through to the first post-’ditch’ record, Zuma, 1968-1975 forms the first great era of Neil Young’s discography. Read the first part of our ranking, from No. 8 - No. 5.

Photo: Gijsbert Hanekroot / Alamy

20 June 2026

Neil Young, Copenhagen, Denmark in 1976

Time Fades Away

Neil Young

8.

Neil Young got the call about Danny Whitten's death between midnight and 1 a.m.. 'It was the Los Angeles Police Department,’ remembers Carrie Snodgress. ‘They had found a white male, no identification, just a note with Neil’s phone number…. It’s somethin’ Neil will carry with him to the grave.’ Young had done everything he could to help his friend. Rehearsals for the Time Fades Away tour at Broken Arrow ranch had been going badly, with Whitten barely able to stand up straight. Between rehearsals, determined to rehabilitate his friend, Young made visits to Danny's trailer. But he was beyond help. The day after Danny’s death, Young wrote ‘Don’t Be Denied’, which set out key events in the guitarist's life.

Time Fades Away, an eight-track live album, saw Young swerve away from the ‘middle of the road’ of Harvest and into the ‘ditch’, as he put it on the liner notes for Decade. ‘I think it’s the worst record I ever made,’ Young said later, ‘but as a documentary of what was happening to me, it was a great record.’ And that was the point. The quality might not be up there with the peak of the 1968-1975 canon, but the album’s live documentation of raw feeling was new, and on his next two ‘ditch’ albums, would produce even more potent results.

Neil Young

7.

Given the emotional turmoil to come — and the accompanying swerve into the ‘ditch trilogy’ — Neil Young’s debut solo album sounds bright and poppy, baroque and worn smooth, sweetly stoned rather than raucously drunk. ‘We had a lotta fun making that record,’ producer David Briggs remembers. ‘We’d get up, smoke a joint, cruise down Mulholland all the way to Hollywood. We’d work in one studio for three hours, then go to another…. It was beautiful.’

Of the 1968-1975 period, Neil Young is the most heavily produced album. Jigsawed together with overdubs, there are two instrumentals, string arrangements and, on ‘The Old Laughing Lady’ and ‘I’ve Loved Her So Long', ragged female backing vocals. On ‘I’ve Been Waiting for You’ we have a riff which, had the guitar simply gone through a distortion pedal, would have sounded almost as big and tough as that on ‘Cinnamon Girl’.

Over the next few years, Young would bear witness to the souring hippie dream, but his debut is still partially bathed in the late 1960s countercultural sunshine. There’s a lazy psychedelic mood to ‘What Did You Do to My Life?’ and ‘If I Could Have Her Tonight’ could have found a home on The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers. 'We got tones nobody’s ever got except Hendrix’, Briggs later enthused. While the vast majority of it works, the album sounds like an artist searching for a clear direction. It wouldn't be long before Young found it with the realisation that less was more.

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Zuma

Neil Young, Crazy Horse

6.

Malibu provided the perfect milieu for Neil Young to record an album in the middle of the 1970s. The Band had their Shangri-La studio nearby, Bob Dylan had a house up the road and Rod Stewart was on the periphery of the wildly hedonistic scene, presumably being Rod Stewart. ‘It was a perfect situation for good times,’ Young remembers in Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream. He and Crazy Horse played all day and partied all night. Dylan dropped by and sang a blues tune at one point, and Keith Moon was discovered comatose on the beach one morning wearing a Nazi uniform.

Zuma witnessed Young emerging from the ‘ditch’ of the previous three albums with a brighter, cleaner sound. ‘I was getting past the lost relationship with Carrie,’ Young said, ‘living the life with my best friends, making some good music, and starting to get a grip on something.’ There's a little venom on ‘Don’t Cry No Tears’ and ‘Stupid Girl’, a softer reflection on break-up on ‘Pardon My Heart’ and a clear sense of moving forward on ‘Lookin’ for a Love’.

The nocturnal, rehearsal-free sessions for Tonight’s the Night seem to have sated Young’s appetite for warts-and-all live recording. But there is still plenty of dirty rock guitar here. Clocking in at 7.30, ‘Cortez the Killer’ features one of Neil Young’s greatest guitar solos, part laser-guided, part distorted textures and wholly driven by his unique feel.

Harvest

Neil Young

5.

’Neil hires some of the best musicians in the world,’ drummer Kenny Buttrey said of the Harvest sessions, ‘and has ’em play as stupid as they possibly can.’ But there was a compliment hiding in the apparent criticism. ‘It’s just ultra-, ultra-simple,’ he elaborated, ‘a laid-back kinda thing nobody but Neil does.’ You can hear the ethos on sparse opener, ‘Out on the Weekend’, which lopes along to Buttrey’s measured drumming. The track feels as wide open as a prairie, before the harmonica floats in on the breeze.

The album has sweet and sour flavours, funnelling some of Young’s personal happiness (he was in love with Carrie Snodgress at the time) and the wider feeling that the hippie dream was well and truly over (‘The Needle and the Damage Done’). The album features some of his best hooks (‘Heart of Gold’, ‘Old Man’), and with the simple accessible arrangements — including the use of a dreamy pedal steel guitar for the first time — it’s easy to see why it remains Young’s most commercially successful album.

Not everything works. ‘A Man Needs a Maid’ and ‘There’s a World’ are strangled by orchestral arrangements played by the London Symphony Orchestra. ‘There’s a World’ would be rescued from its bloated production when it was covered by Sufjan Stevens, appearing on his 2023 studio album Javelin.