“Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by Neil Young

"Only Love Can Break Your Heart" is the third track on After the Gold Rush, Neil Young's 1970 album, and when it went out as a single that October it gave him his first top-40 hit under his own name, topping out at 33 in the US. Young wrote it alone and produced it with David Briggs, and it's a gentle, open-hearted thing: his acoustic guitar, Nils Lofgren on piano, Greg Reeves on bass, Ralph Molina on drums, a flugelhorn from Bill Peterson, and Molina and Danny Whitten singing alongside Young.

Who it's for depends on who you ask. The story goes that Young wrote it for Graham Nash after Nash and Joni Mitchell split, though Young has never sounded too sure about that, and a filmmaker named Bob Giuliana has claimed it was really about him.

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