10 Songs That Will Reduce An Open Heart To Tears: #5

Neil Young’s “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”

 
I can’t quite describe it but there’s just something about Neil Young that I’ve come to think of as eternal.

And it doesn’t have to do with what is conventionally meant by “timeless” or “universal.”

It’s something much more akin to simultaneously ultra – even quintessentially – human and also cosmic (somewhere right in between the literal and mystical senses of that word).

The casual “Neil” fan might not know exactly to what I’m referring next, but Neil Young has a way of juxtaposing opposite worlds in a stanza that somehow comes to perfectly represent universality (a good use for that word here, I think).

“Old man lying by the side of the road
with the lorries rolling by
Blue moon sinking from the weight of the load
And the buildings scrape the sky”

And by the time you get to the chorus:

“Don’t let it bring you down
It’s only castles burning
Find someone who’s turning
And you will come around”

Who over the age of 21 hasn’t had this thought / feeling (everyone), but who else has ever put it so perfectly (no one). And there’s still that small bit of ambiguity, leaving it open just enough to fill in your own meaning.

The first time I ever heard the song Don’t Let It Bring You Down was in a movie theater. And, most significantly in my own relationship to the song, it was not Neil Young’s version.

I bet 1 in 100 of anyone reading this knows already or can figure out pretty quickly when and what movie it was.

If you guessed American Beauty you’d be exactly right. It was 1999.

The version was Annie Lenox’s, and it absolutely floored me right from that first chord change, the change that defines the song, and, even more than the lyrics, gives it its power and strange, haunting “eternal-ness.”

The day after the movie I found out what the song was and bought the Annie Lenox album it’s from, Medusa, consisting entirely of covers.

I listened to it so much that by the time I first heard Neil Young’s version it seemed strange and foreign to my ears.

Kind of simple, unadorned, and ragged compared to the lush, synth-based Lennox version.

But the exact, completely unique feeling was very much there intact.

Those brilliant, other-worldly chords (which Neil Young has such a penchant for using, simply, on an acoustic guitar) would translate equally through any instrument.

They transform a listener (me anyway). When I hear it, it pulls me way out into the cosmos while being simultaneously inside the deepest, most mundanely stunning human reality.

It’s life and death at the same time.

I feel all this before the first verse of this song is close to over.

Tears of the magnitude of existence. Chills down my spine.

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