“Pocahontas” by Neil Young

"Pocahontas" goes back to the mid-'70s, when Neil Young cut it for Chrome Dreams, an album he planned and then left on the shelf. That same recording, dressed up with overdubs, finally surfaced on Rust Never Sleeps in 1979, and an early take later turned up on 2017's Hitchhiker. David Briggs produced and mixed it, with Richard Kaplan engineering.

The spark may have come from Hart Crane's 1930 poem The Bridge, which Young read in London in 1971 and which puts Matoaka, the 17th-century Indigenous heroine better known by her white name, Pocahontas, at its heart. Commentators have long caught a family resemblance to Carole King's "He's a Bad Boy".

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