FUN FACTS
- Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969) is the second album by Canadian rockstar Neil Young. The album was released in May 1969 by Reprise Records.
- This album is the moment between his solo debut and his debut with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. He recorded it with his backing band, Crazy Horse, whose original members he had poached from a lesser known Los Angeles group called the Rockets.
- It is included in the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2005) list, along with 6 other albums by Young. It’s also in both Rolling Stone magazine and NME‘s respective 500 Greatest Albums of All Time lists.
- Neil Young wrote three of the songs on this album—Cinnamon Girl, Down by the River, and Cowgirl in the Sand—while he was in bed with a fever of 39 °C. Which is very 2020 of him.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969) is my favorite album out of this list. To be fair, I think the entire decade was excellent. I told Billie early on that the 60s was probably going to be my favorite period. Maybe it’s self-fulfilling. But I don’t think that takes away from the fact the 60s, as a decade of music, is, objectively, the c o o l e s t.
In every genre, there’s this atmosphere of misty-eyed resistance. An impulse to speak to the times. Questioning. Rallying. Crossing lines. A hint of rebelliousness in every corner. A whisper of romance, of the duty to dream big in a world that wants to cut your hair and make you sit in a certain place or fight in war that has nothing to do with you. I enjoyed how I thought I had a genre or an artist well-pegged, and then I would come across a song or a story that unspooled my own assumptions about what sounds good and why.
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969) is a great way to almost close the period. Personally, this is the kind of music I listen to and love. And it’s definitely an album that speaks to me as a person. Neil Young captures the spiritual restlessness and the absurdity of excess of the times. And he does it in a way that’s honest and light without being earnest or exhausting.
This is one of those albums that deserves to be experienced in its entirety. It deepens whatever affections or impressions you have of the 60s: experimental, emotional, and excessive. The title track, which is also the shortest track, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, is an ode to the exhausting meaninglessness of being a musician in Los Angeles, where the value of your worth as an artist is relative to who you might know or what you can give other people. It sounds like an emotional breakdown, the point of fatigue when everything just stops being worth it.
Everybody seems to wonder/ What it’s like down here/ I gotta get away/ from this day-to-day/ running around/ Everybody knows/ this is nowhere.
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
The rest of the songs in the album complement this miserable absurdity.
The hypnotizing and foreboding mental spiral in Round & Round (It Won’t Be Long) (It’s hard enough losin’/ the paper illusion you’ve hidden inside/ Without the confusion/ of findin’ you’re usin’/ the crutch of the lie/ To shelter your pride when you cry).
The nine-minute death and murder in Down by the River encapsulating the violence of the age, the adventurism abroad and the injustice on the streets and the serial killers in our beds (This much madness is too much sorrow/ It’s impossible to make it today/ She could drag me over the rainbow/ Send me away/ Down by the river/ I shot my baby/ Down by the river)
The defeated honky-tonk country song about living with never getting your own in The Losing End (When You’re On) (It’s so hard to make love pay/ When you’re on the losing end/ And I feel that way again).
There are a lot more negative, sadder lyrics in the album than there are happy ones, and yet the whole thing manages to come off as light-hearted and spry. A Pitchfork review wrote that it privileged groove and feeling above all, and it’s so true. We’ve listened to albums that rallied to a cause and albums that licked wounds caused by the excesses of the age—Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969) is somewhere to the left of all that.
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969) is a friend. It has the vibe of having 99 problems except the ability to admit that to yourself. It’s the album for the people who know when to quit. When you find yourself at a point in life where you’re feeling lost and defeated, sometimes, nowhere is exactly the place you need to be to start again.
FOR YOU
What did you think of the album? Send your thoughts to mxaboha@gmail.com!
- What does an emotional breakdown sound like to you?
- When was the last time you got lost and you didn’t have Google Maps to help you figure things out? How’d you get out of that situation?
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969) Copyright belongs to Neil Young and Reprise Records.
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