Neil Young + Crazy Horse - Sleeps with Angels - POLL Your Mind

It's going to be Driveby, Trans Am or Safeway Cart for me. But which one? Hmmm

Safeway Cart is my favourite Neil song full stop.

And overall this album probably has the advantage over Landing on Water as the Neil album I play the most.

Wait what?!?! Westbury, you love Landing on Water? That's in my Top 3 Neil! I ---- I thought I was the only one!

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Went for Safeway Cart, but I love My Heart, the gloriously ropey flute playing on Prime of Life, and the epic burn of Change Your Mind. Trans Am is amazing, as is the title track - so dark and heavy yet with the raggedly beautiful CH harmonies.
I love how this album takes Neil and CH places they'd never gone before. Its twilight experimental vibe bridges Philadelphia and Dead Man beautifully.

This album has all kinds of strange instrumental filigrees: the high flute in "Prime of Life," that gnarled guitar fillip in "Safeway Cart," Neil's falsetto.

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― The Luda of Suburbia (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, November 28, 2025 5:15 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I love this record beucz Neil totally should have made it with like Niko Bolas producing & gotten Ben Keith and Tim Drummond and Jim Keltner to play on it but instead got the Horse to play completely outside their skill set and it is beautiful

The album cover though...hoo-boy

everytime something broke in our house, my dad would start singing a line from “piece of crap”

the actual best Neil album of the 90s; ragged glory gets all the praise but this one has the better songs and perfectly grimey 90s tonights the night vibe

"Safeway Cart" is such an unusual song. Iirc it's used well in ... "Beau Travail"? I'm a sucker for his epics, though, so I might lean "Change Your Mind" for its utter indulgence.

I posed this awesome video/performance on a different Neil thread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovum-GjYWKQ

really great album that I came to quite late - this whole stretch is ripe for rediscovery (though maybe that’s already been done). I mean, ‘freedom’ through ‘silver & gold’ stacks with ‘everybody knows…’ through ‘zuma’ imho (maybe marginally lesser)

Joseph Stannard's "alternative' NY primer for The Wire a few years back had a lot of focus on this period, connecting the Dead Man/Year of The Horse era with drone rock, doom metal etc" via the coinage "envirometal". But there's definitely more to be written on Neil's 90s.

I don't recall any of this era going under the radar; I think this one got five stars in RS (fwiw). I suppose people started to take him for granted around Mirror Ball/Silver&Gold/Broken Arrow/Dead Man. There was that recent Neko Case "What's In Your Bag?" where she picks the "Dead Man" soundtrack and wonders why more people don't talk about it. To paraphrase, "it's an hour of Neil Young playing electric guitar, what more do you want?" From memory, the early 2000s run staunched his comeback reputation. "Are You Passionate?", "Greendale," those two in particular. I wonder what revisiting them would reveal?

I'm kinda of a weirdo (wait, let me revise that: especially where Neil Young is concerned, I'm a massive weirdo) in that Freedom, Ragged Glory, and Harvest Moon are three of my LEAST favorite Neil albums. I also don't like the back half of his '70s, whereas I have a lot of time for his '80s, and I think his 2000s were an awesome decade. Anyway, the way his life's work maps itself out in my own mind, Sleeps with Angels is where he started getting his mojo back: I'm half-and-half of this album (Western Hero and Train of Love, being Harvest Moon leftovers, are the main obstacle), but I adore Mirror Ball and love Broken Arrow and Silver + Gold.

That said, I am open to change! Other than Shakey, and this innaresting Stannard piece Stew mentions (but Dead Man/Year of the Horse praise aligns with the stuff I like already), are there pieces of writing that don't take it for granted that Neil was good in the early '90s, but are articulate about *why* ?

Freedom, Ragged Glory, and Harvest Moon are three of my LEAST favorite Neil albums

Weirdo.

Problem being that almost everything I've read that praises his Freedom --> Angels stretch conceptualizes it as a "return to form" after a wonky 1980s, but that angle means nothing to me, since I think his '80s were delightful.

I like Landing on Water and Life. The Eldorado EP >>>> Freedom

Ha, disagree, but it's an awesome preview of that run!!

Yeah, his 80s are definitely wonky, but that's just Neil being Neil. Unlike many of his peers, the various experiments and shifts in style seem borne of artistic curiosity rather than scratching around for a "direction". While he certainly had a strong run from Freedom to SWA, trying to separate it out from what came immediately before and after is a bit reductive. It's a convenient narrative, not least because it coincides with alt rock bands championing him.

Life is seriously underrated, the first half anyway.

FASHION CHANGE!

STYLE CHANGE

*synth bloops and burps*