Harvest

Harvest is the record that turned Neil Young from cult favorite into a bona fide superstar, and half a century on it remains the foundation stone of his legacy — the warmest, most accessible statement he ever made. Its songwriting peaks are towering: the delicate, yearning "Heart of Gold," the age-weary "Old Man," and the title track's quiet confessionals have entered the folk-rock canon, and the relaxed Nashville session band gives the whole record a lived-in, front-porch intimacy that his earlier, harder-edged albums never attempted. It was the best-selling album of its year, and retrospectives routinely rank it among the essential singer-songwriter records of the 1970s.

The polish is also where the record is most disputed. Young's decision to dress two songs in London Symphony Orchestra strings divided opinion from the start — some critics found the grandeur moving, others found it overblown, and at least one chorus has been called unintentionally funny by later reviewers. Early reviewers heard the session band as a weak imitation of his usual outfit, and more than one contemporary critic thought the smooth, accessible sound was a retreat from the grittier music that made his name. There is no real disagreement that the album's gentle, slightly sentimental surface hides melancholy depths; the argument is whether that sentimentality is earned or embarrassing.

The emotional heart is the stark live acoustic "The Needle and the Damage Done," a two-minute warning about heroin addiction that sits in deliberate, chilling contrast to the warmth around it — no other song on the record sounds remotely like it, and it is the reason critics describe Harvest as hopeful and devastating at once. Themes of aging, loneliness, rural life, and the difficulty of accepting love run through everything, which is why the album has aged into something like a national heirloom: it sounds cozy, and it is, but it is also quietly about how fragile that coziness is.