I don’t know where and when that seductive “Neil Young beat” first came to be. That definitive “boom-boom POP [pause], boom-boom POP [pause]” that Tom Petty borrowed for “You Don’t Know How It Feels.” But nowhere does it sound as good as in this 1972 song about a former caretaker at the California ranch Neil bought the year before.

Dynamics in Neil’s best songs are built by small additions. Listen here for James Taylor’s unexpected banjo debut plucking its way into the chorus, then Ben Keith’s steady sliding note on the pedal steel. Gorgeous music.

2 - POWDERFINGER

Few people agree what happens to the narrator of Neil's remarkable 1979 song "Powderfinger," rolling along a countryfied beat during the disco/punk age. But we do know he doesn't survive the five-minute song.

Did our hero get shot from shooters of the boat coming up the river? Did his own gun backfire when his "face splashed in the sky"? Filled with incredible details and backstory – “Big John’s been drinking since the river took Emmy Lou” – the song essentially plays out like a darkest Mark Twain story.

What this is all for, I don’t know. Maybe a Canadian's tsk-tsk over gun culture in the USA, delivered over a 19th-century American landscape? Again, timeless territory.

The original recording, for the unmaterialized Chrome Dreams album in 1977 (and finally appearing on Hitchhiker in 2017), is a stripped-down acoustic version. Nice, but it pales big-time to the live recording from 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, where – as with so many of his songs – the guitar solos shoot for the sky and continue the narrative on their own right.

1 – ONE OF THESE DAYS

The chorus of this beautiful song from Harvest Moon, the best of Neil’s many “Neil is back!” albums since the 1970s heyday, goes: “one of these days, I’m going to sit down and write a long letter to all the good friends I’ve known.” Every note is restrained, relaxed, sitting back in a low-key pocket. The sum swells very big. Hear the little guitar noodles here, a welling of steel guitar there. And ANYONE who doubts Neil’s ability to sing needs to revisit the third verse of the live recording, below: “Some are we-e-eaak, some are strong.” It destroys me.

Neil finished his incredible concert at Nashville’s fabled Ryman Auditorium with this (as documented in Jonathan Demme’s excellent film Heart of Gold). IT IS PERFECT. Four acoustic guitars, little horns peppering behind the melody, over a dozen backup-vocalists in restrained harmony.

Play this one at my funeral, if I have one.