Neil Young
Tonight's The Night

Unlike his illustrious compatriot Leonard Cohen, who reasoned, wrote, and even sang like a European, the Canadian Neil Young has been an "American" singer-songwriter par excellence, able to assimilate the tradition of folksingers, transforming it into a highly personal form of rock, yet never entirely abandoning it.
Thus, many albums from his golden period can feature splendid and tender acoustic ballads alongside "raw" venomous, hysterical, or deep and tormented rock tunes. From one album to the next, the mood of the moment prevails, so it should not be surprising that "Tonight's The Night," composed in 1973, appears as different from the famous "Harvest" (1972) as night from day. Since this album was indeed released in June 1975, it is time to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, all the more so as it is a true masterpiece.

Everything that made the atmosphere of "Harvest" magical has vanished: the simple grace of the country ballads, the exaltation of vast spaces as places of freedom, the dream of a possible alternative life, hippy communes, and so on. "Tonight's The Night" is the other side of Neil Young: cold disillusionment, almost absolute pessimism, tremendous weariness, an extreme attempt to retreat into solitude.
The album is dedicated to two friends who recently died from drugs: one is Danny Whitten, from Crazy Horse, his historic band. The other is named Bruce Berry, and his name appears in Tonight's The Night, a distorted and obsessive blues that opens and closes (practically unchanged) the album, in essence a report of his death, barren as an obituary and cold as the shiver that runs down a friend's spine when he hears the news.
Both drugs and death saturate Tired Eyes, where everything seems to express weariness and impotence: both the sluggish rhythm and Neil Young's dragging voice, which at times just speaks. Similarly, in Borrowed Tune, he seems to be seen in an empty room, toying with piano and harmonica, not even having the strength to invent his own tune, borrowing one instead to weave his melancholy upon. And when listening to the bleak yet splendid Albuquerque, entirely based on the low tones of the electric guitar, doesn't it feel like being there, at the same table with Neil Young, sharing with him, in some random diner, eggs and ham and solitude, looking for a place where finally no one cares who we are?

But although dark tones prevail, it's not that this album has the cadence of a funeral march: there are several moments of energy, even if it generally appears as anger. One example is World On A String, with its dry and nervous rhythm marked by a drum that seems in a hurry to finish the track, another is Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown, the purest rock in the entire album, also supported by a somewhat less reflective text.
The same slow songs are not necessarily sad: there are also those that are simply sweet like Mellow My Mind, so "harmless" that it could be covered many years later by Simply Red, or like the delightful blues Speakin' Out, enriched from top to bottom by a sparkle of piano notes. In short, Neil Young, as much as he is immersed in personal and profound reflections, as much as he is marked by the trials of life, certainly has not given up composing the music he feels is most his own, to the point that in Roll Another Number, even the typical "Harvest" style country-rock reappears, albeit associated with lyrics that, like almost all of those on the album, leave little room for hope.

"Tonight's The Night" is the tormented fruit of a very difficult phase in the life of a very sensitive artist, and this is precisely its greatness.