For the former Canadian politician see Neil Young (politician)
Neil Percival Kenneth Robert Ragland Young, better known as Neil Young (born November 12, 1945) is a Canadian singer-songwriter who has become one of the most respected and influential musicians of his generation.
Young’s best songs are characterized by deeply personal lyrics, distinctive guitar work, and an almost instantly recognizable nasal tenor voice. Although he accompanies himself on several different instruments, including piano and harmonica, his hammer-on style of acoustic guitar and often idiosyncratic soloing on electric guitar are the lynchpins of a sometimes ragged, sometimes polished, but nothing if not evocative sonic ambiance.
Although Young has experimented widely with soul, swing, jazz, rockabilly, and electronica throughout a varied career, his most accessible and best known work generally falls into either of two distinct styles: an acoustic, country-tinged folk rock, such songs like " Heart of Gold" or " Old Man," or grinding, lumbering form of hard rock, heard on songs like " Cinnamon Girl" or " Southern Man."
Young first came to prominence as a member of the folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield in the mid- 1960s and then as a solo performer backed by the band Crazy Horse. He reached his commercial peak during the singer-songwriter boom of the early 1970s with the albums After the Gold Rush and Harvest as well as with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. He has long been distrustful of commercial management in the music business, and has at times created highly accessible and durable popular music while at other times has indulged in outlandish and uncompromising experiments that have left audiences, critics, and—in one notable case—his record label baffled.