Pitchfork

Neil Young is the kind of man that appreciates albums in the traditional sense: cohesive beginning-to-end statements, occasionally thematic if the mood suits him, and preferably experienced through big analog speakers on crackly old vinyl. His resistance to digital music has been well-documented, and until recently, several of his releases-- including 1974's classic On the Beach-- had never been made available on compact disc. So one can imagine him in an A&R office upstairs at Reprise Records, year after year, continually shooting down the concept of a compilation that attempts to condense his entire history onto a single disc. He's already been compiled once anyway-- with the 1977 double-disc retrospective Decade.

Regardless, we're now being offered Greatest Hits, although Young does seems begrudging: Its only liner notes are the obligatory song credits and one line from Young himself that simply states, "Greatest hits inclusion based on original record sales, airplay, and known download history." These criteria are not only anathema to his aesthetic (since when does the man behind "This Note's For You" care about airplay?), but here they comprise a collection that only skims the surface of his catalog: The tracklist features 16 songs from his 35-year career, ranging from 1969's "Down by the River" to 1991's "Harvest Moon".

Young's stubborn integrity extends beyond his politics-- which inform all of his songs, but only define a few like "Ohio" and "Rockin' in the Free World"-- and saturates his music. His catalog is riddled with sharp contrasts and sly contradictions, not least of which is the fact that this bearish-looking man sings with such a fragile falsetto. More crucially, Young moves from ragged guitar epics to jangly country ballads with impressive agility. He's also not one to rein in his songs, so they may often run for only two intense minutes ("The Needle and the Damage Done") or sprawl to upwards of nine ("Down by the River", "Cowgirl in the Sand").

These extremes make for a strange and strangely compelling Greatest Hits. Conceptually, it shouldn't work: Young has played many roles over 3\xBD decades, but indeed, he's never been a singles artist. In fact, he has only a passing acquaintance with the pop singles chart-- "Heart of Gold" went to #1, but he's had only two other solo top 40 singles-- and many of his most popular songs run much longer than the typical single's three minutes.

The disc begins, perversely and brilliantly, with the one-two punch of "Down By the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand", which together total almost 20 minutes. This seems less an act of rebellion than a simple stroke of luck, as the compilation is sequenced chronologically. Even so, the songs illustrate clearly that Young and the hits format aren't exactly perfect for each other, while still constituting an impressive introduction for newcomers. Which is precisely what this record is designed to do.

Greatest Hits is obviously intended mostly for curious initiates or casual listeners (although the remastered tracks will likely attract hardcore Young fans, too), and it achieves its goals sufficiently. Those unacquainted with his work will learn that Young was a tremendous guitar player who gave himself ample room to range; that Crazy Horse understood the need to provide a good backdrop for his solos and knew how to churn a drag-the-river momentum; that Young was an able songwriter who could craft a killer line like "The Needle and the Damage Done" clincher "every junkie's like a setting sun." What they won't learn is the difference between Young's work with Crazy Horse and Crosby, Stills & Nash: All 16 tracks are presented as Young's solo work, which is misleading. Historical liner notes could have cleared this up and even introduced Young's collaborators. Instead, the package leaves it to listeners to infer these distinctions from the song credits.

Fittingly, Greatest Hits skews to Young's early material: Eleven of these tracks represent his 1969-71 output, and only two songs postdate the 1970s (and, therefore, the still-in-print, two-disc Decade). The implication is that Young more or less faded away, and that his first few albums far outshine his subsequent material. But such a view is surely reductive: Young has not only been actively releasing albums throughout the 90s and into the 00s, but several of them been unexpectedly solid as well. The sadly missed "Cortez the Killer" and "Tonight's the Night" are the set's most obvious exclusions, but the dismissal of late-era tracks like "This Note's for You", "Fuckin' Up", or even "From Hank to Hendrix" is unfortunate, too.

Of course, it's all too easy to nitpick any greatest-hits tracklist-- any of them could be said to carry grievous omissions or curious inclusions. On one hand, this type of cursory overview isn't supposed to give us a detailed portrait of the artist, only a general sketch; on the other, Young is too complex a musician to be adequately represented by a mere 16 songs. The music on Greatest Hits holds up undeniably well, but the concept itself-- perhaps inevitably-- falters, failing to capture the essence of one of rock's sturdiest and most ragged voices.

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