From Robyn on Patreon in 2026
Certain records have to appear at the right time, have to come at the correct angle, like a ray of moonlight getting to you through a crack in the curtains. Many people had told me many good things about Neil Young’s On The Beach over the years, but I’d never got off on the right foot with Neil: the way my friends seemed to turn to him as the new Bob Dylan in the early 1970s put me off him. I was still in thrall to the old Bob Dylan.
However, as time rolled on my prejudices dissolved and I began to let Neil Young’s music seep into me. He had more grit than his California harmony colleagues (though they had other qualities) and he seemed more open and less bitter than the Dylan of the 1970s and 1980s. To be sure, he, too, was in thrall to Dylan, and he contracted a harmonica habit to go along with that. Still, two decades on from Harvest, when Harvest Moon came out in 1992 I loved it.
Two more decades had passed when I marooned myself for a winter on the Isle of Wight, with an Australian singer named Emma Swift. We were in a house that had been briefly inhabited in 1859 by Charles Darwin and his wife Emma, who by all accounts found the Victorian building too damp and dismal: they left before the year was out. A century and a half later, Emma Swift felt much the same, and after a couple of months she returned to Australia to fulfil commitments as a radio DJ. She left me with a copy of On The Beach and an open invitation to join her any time in Sydney.
Alone in downtime wintertime in an old damp upstairs apartment in an out-of-season seaside village - beautiful though the sea and the cliffs surrounding me were - the scene was finally set for me to walk into On The Beach. I had all the solitude I needed to absorb Neil Young’s hymn to disillusionment from the Pacific coast some 40 years earlier. The sheer inertia of the thing got to me, of stalling before you fall: the lazy hypnosis of a landscape without motivation. After a while, the album calmed me down, gave me a window through which to stare at the oscillations in my own life, and the world in which I found myself. The title track is, to me, the fulcrum of the album. Through its zonked out prism Neil Young distills an indifference that hardens into strength: nothing matters, so let’s carry on doing it:
Though my problems are meaningless
That don’t make them go away
Well, you probably know the album by now - if not, no glowing journalese from me can take the place of actually experiencing it, when the circumstances are right. On The Beach is a world of its own, along with such masterpieces as Lou Reed’s Berlin, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, and Revelator by Gillian Welch that all seem to exist independent of their creator’s other records.
I left the Isle of Wight after a while and joined Emma on the greater island of Australia, where we recorded a version of “Motion Pictures”, the penultimate track of On The Beach, for a Record Store Day single. The album remained a stand-out in our joint record collection as we swirled across the world, and several copies are here with us in Nashville as I write.