Harvest Moon by Neil Young (1992).

Neil Young is the most enigmatic pop artist in my lifetime. He has been associated with some of the most influential movements in protest rock, environmentalism, singer/songwriter pop, grunge, and (most recently) musical theater, but it’s rare that any of these careers come together in any single production.

This album is no exception. Grunge fans, inspired by Young’s collaboration with Pearl Jam on 1995’s Mirror Ball might have found enough of Young’s very early output to satisfy them, but if they stumbled across 1972’s album Harvest they would have been prepared for this album. Sure, Harvest contained a track that hinted at Young as the godfather of grunge (“Alabama”), but Young’s grunge was always produced to highlight the clarity of his lyrics (see also “Cinnamon Girl” and “Out of the Blue”) in a way that the Seattle productions of the early nineties were not.

This album is Young on acoustic guitar singing wistful songs about lost friends, such a woman, a dead dog, and an unknown legend.

I love “Unknown Legend,” a song about a woman in a nowhere job who inspires the singer to memorialize her. When I lived in Denver in the time this album was being recorded, I knew a barmaid in a low-limit casino in the mountains who, as far as I knew, was the most beautiful woman on earth at the time. For me, she is the woman Young sings about in that song.

“Natural Beauty” is another terrific song. Young can personalize most subjects, and here he puts environmental protection into a beautiful refrain: “A natural beauty should be preserved like a monument to nature.” There are philosophical principles underlying this that are much more complicated, but Young does us the favor of not dwelling on them. After observing that natural beauty should be preserved like a monument, Young’s next line is “Don’t judge yourself too harsh my love, or someday you might find your soul endangered.”

This invitation to remember that we are all monuments to nature is typical of Young. “Old King” was a monument to nature. Hank Williams and Jimi Hendrix were monuments to nature. The people that Young wants to reach out to in “One of These Days” are monuments to nature. Certainly the unknown legend was a monument to nature.

From Young’s point of view, seeing monuments to nature in these phenomena are just what a “Dreamin’ Man” would appreciate.