“After The Gold Rush” by Neil Young

The title track of Neil Young's 1970 album is about as bare as rock records get: little more than Young at the piano, singing high and lonesome, and Bill Peterson's flugelhorn drifting in like a voice from another century. He produced it with David Briggs for Reprise, and the spareness is the whole point.

What it's about is anybody's guess, Young's included. When Dolly Parton, who later covered it with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, called to ask him what it meant, he told her he had no idea; she figured the Second Coming, an alien invasion, or both. It has lived on across Decade, Greatest Hits and the live Live Rust, and Rolling Stone placed it at 323 on its 2021 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.