Down by the River

Neil Young says he never shot anybody. “I shot my baby down by the river.” He sings the line flatly, almost conversationally, like a man confessing to something he still can’t quite believe he did, and then he spends the rest of his life telling people it isn’t literal.

He has said it’s a metaphor. He has never once said what it’s a metaphor for. That’s the whole thing about this song. The most direct line on the record is the one nobody can pin down, and the man who wrote it isn’t helping. The ambiguity isn’t a riddle he’s withholding the answer to. It might be that there is no answer, and he knew that when he sang it.

The song is nine minutes long, and most of those nine minutes are the same guitar figure repeating while Young and Crazy Horse build and release tension like a tide coming in. You feel the drummers settle into the groove. You feel the bass find its pocket. And then Young starts wailing on his guitar like he’s trying to get something out of his body that won’t leave any other way.

This was the second album with Crazy Horse, and you can hear the band finding out what they were. They weren’t polished. They could barely get through takes without something going wrong. That was the point of them. The rawness wasn’t a flaw they were stuck with, it was the only way the thing worked at all. They played like people who had nothing to lose because they didn’t.

The solo doesn’t go anywhere. It circles, and circles, and gets a little more intense each time around, and somewhere in there you forget there was a song attached to it. There’s just the feeling left, the thing the music keeps reaching for and never quite closes its hand around.

That’s why he won’t explain it. A song that could be explained wouldn’t need nine minutes. He gave you the one line you can repeat and then buried it under everything that can’t be said, and the burying is the music.

Sometimes you don’t need to understand something to feel it break your heart.