Americana is the 33rd studio album by Canadian / American musician Neil Young, released on June 5, 2012. The album was Young's first collaboration with backing band Crazy Horse since their 2003 album, Greendale, and its associated tour.
The album was inspired by Young's experiences in his first rock band as a teenager. His band The Squires would play rock versions of old folk standards. He explains in a June 2012 interview with Rolling Stone's Austin Scaggs: "Back in 1964 or '65, the Squires were playing a folk club in Thunder Bay, Ontario," says Young, 66. "A group called the Thorns did a version of 'Oh Susannah' that just knocked me on my ass." Young continues in interviews for the biography Shakey:
Young's time with the Squires and his early encounters with Tim Rose and The Thorns and his early interactions with Stephen Stills were fresh in his memory due to writing one of his memoirs, Waging Heavy Peace. Young explains to NPR's Terry Gross:
Young explains his interest in the grittier history and lyrics of the album's songs in American Songwriter:
Young elaborates on some of the forgotten verses of "This Land Is Your Land" for NPR: "Yeah, you didn't sing those. In "This Land is Your Land", I'm sure probably - 'By the relief office I saw my people,' you know, the whole verse there about people being, you know, going to the relief office in the Depression and all of that. And you didn't sing, you know, after they heard about all the people in the Depression standing in the bread line, you didn't sing: 'It made me wonder, is this land made for you and me?' None of that. Those were protest songs when they came out, and they were, you know, cleaned up and milked down for the, you know, New Christy Minstrels et cetera, and everybody got to sing them like they were happy little songs."
For "Jesus' Chariot (She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain)", Young discovered the song's origins as a spiritual with darker, more meaningful lyrics while researching the song for the album.
Young recorded the album with Crazy Horse at his Broken Arrow Ranch in October and November 2011. His wife, Pegi Young and Stephen Stills contribute vocals to the final track. Several tracks also feature a choir. Young and Crazy Horse would record Psychedelic Pill, an album of original songs, at the same location a few months afterward.
Americana received strongly polarized reviews from music critics. It holds an average score of 68 out of 100 at Metacritic, based on 31 reviews. Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune gave the album three-and-a-half out of four stars, writing that "Americana reveals the hard truth inside songs that have been taken for granted." Dan Forte, in Vintage Guitar, said "this may be his best since Rust [Never Sleeps]." Johnny Dee in his review for the magazine Classic Rock remarks how "Young has picked every song apart, reworked melody and lyrics and made them his own", making them better for it.
In a mixed review, Michael Hann of The Guardian found the album "impossibly pointless" and felt that some songs exhibit "sloppiness" and "unnecessary lengths". NME reviewer considers the album "largely sub-standard covers of folk songs."
Robert Christgau named Americana the best album of 2012 in his year-end list for The Barnes & Noble Review, and cited it as one of his top 25 albums of the 2010s decade.
Crazy Horse
Additional personnel
Additional roles
Blu-ray production