27 September 2025
Living legend NEIL YOUNG released his 28th longplayer
PRAIRIE WIND today 20 years ago, on 27 September 2005.
An acoustic-based record reminiscent of his earlier albums Harvest and Harvest Moon.
The album’s songs find Young pondering his own mortality, as he was undergoing treatment for an aneurysm during the album’s production.
Songs were also inspired by the extended illness of his father, Canadian sportswriter and novelist Scott Young, who passed a few weeks after the album was completed. The LP is dedicated in part to the elder Young.
It peaked at #11 in the US and #22 in the UK.
Pitchfork wrote: “That voice, alternately gentle and strident, tender and outraged,
has held up surprisingly well, gaining gritty authority with age. His few cracks and
wrinkles just reinforce the sense of wistful nostalgia that suffuses Prairie Wind as
well as almost all his other folk-rock albums since Harvest Moon, if not since
Harvest.”
Vintage Young melancholia.