Ragged Glory (1990)

Ragged Glory is the twentieth studio album by Canadian-American singer-songwriter Neil Young, and his sixth album with the band Crazy Horse. It was released by Reprise Records on September 10, 1990. Ragged Glory was voted the 36th best grunge album of all time by Rolling Stone in 2019. A live recording of the album from November 2023 was released as Fuckin' Up in April 2024.

Recording

The Ragged Glory sessions took place in April 1990 at Young's Broken Arrow Ranch. The band played a set of songs twice a day for a couple of weeks (never repeating the same songs in a set), then went back, listened and chose the best takes. According to Young, this approach "took 'analysis' out of the game during the sessions, allowing the Horse to not think".

Music and lyrics

The album revisits the heavy rock style previously explored on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Zuma. "Country Home" and "White Line" both date from the mid-1970s. Like Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, the album features many extended guitar jams, with two songs stretching out to more than ten minutes. In an October 1990 interview with Rolling Stone's James Henke, Young compares the two albums: "It's probably closer to that record than anything else I've done. I can't compare it to anything else. I purposely wanted to play long instrumentals because I don't hear any jamming on any other records. There's nothing spontaneous going on on records these days, except in blues and funkier music. Rock & roll used to have all that. People aren't reaching out in the instrumental passages and spontaneously letting them last as long as they can. I love to do that, but I can only really do it well with one band. I tried it a little on Freedom. But that style of music is better for me with Crazy Horse. We played just like a band. It wasn't someone in a control room with a bunch of machines, a MIDI and synthesizers and a drum machine and producers and tech people. You just can't get that old-time vibrating feeling with machines. That happens with musicians who just love to play and improvise together. I knew that not many people were doing that, so I really wanted to do it. We did cut an acoustic track for it, but it wasn't one I wrote in the same time frame as I wrote the majority of the songs. It just didn't fit, the feeling didn't fit, so we left it off. It's funny, I wrote seven of the songs in a week. It was two weeks before Farm Aid. Those are the last seven songs on the album. The first two, "Country Home" and "White Line," I wrote years and years ago; they were songs we were never able to get right back then. And I wrote "Fuckin' Up" around the end of the Freedom period, when I did Saturday Night Live. We used it for a warm-up song there."

"Farmer John" is a cover of a 1960s song, written and performed by R&B duo Don and Dewey and also performed by British Invasion group The Searchers as well as garage band The Premiers. Young explains the inclusion of the cover: "That was really spontaneous. It just came about while we were practicing one day. Well, we were recording, because practicing and recording are all the same for us. We were rolling the tape and putting things down, but we'd just about finished the album and then we got this take." Young used to play the song as a teenager in his first live performances in a band. He credits these performances with discovering his love for improvisation and playing live. Poncho Sampedro remembers asking Young "Man, why don't we just play some song that you played in your first band when you were starting out? Let's just play something different to be loose." He then started 'Farmer John.' We played it one time. And it made it on the record.

The song "Days that Used to Be" is inspired by Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages" and employs the same melody. It was written while sailing in the Pacific after the release of This Note's for You.

The closing track, "Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)", uses the melody of the folk song "The Water Is Wide". Young recorded the guitar at Farm Aid and said it is "based on an old hymn. I don't know the name of it, but it's a traditional melody from years gone by. And I modified it. I used different chords and screwed around with it. The folk process. I'm just an old folkie; I can't find my acoustic guitar anymore, that's the problem [laughs]."

Outtake and B-side "Don't Spook the Horse" was promoted as a "special profane bonus track". Young told Rolling Stone that it is "a condensed version of the whole album. Especially for reviewers who don't like me at all. Just listen to that one, and you'll get all you need."