Neil Young's "Times Square" - A 1988-1989 Compilation

It's safe to say that the 1980s were a controversial decade for Neil Young; he'd signed onto Geffen Records in 1982, and his first album on that label was Trans, which was met with divisive reaction from both critics and fans. From what's been said, David Geffen didn't like Neil's initial submission Island in the Sun, and I bet that he regretted rejecting it when Trans was released. The feud between the two worsened when Neil released the rockabilly Everybody's Rockin', which resulted in a lawsuit from Geffen over releasing music that wasn't commercial or representative of Neil as an artist, only for Neil to countersue.

There were two lessons to come from all of this: Let your recording artists do their own thing, and never ever piss off Neil Young by telling him what to do with his material.

Neil's next albums under Geffen - Old Ways, Landing on Water and Life - also didn't do so well critically, and by 1988, he was back with Reprise Records starting with This Note's for You, but it was next year's Freedom that brought Neil Young some of his best reviews since Rust Never Sleeps in 1979. 35 years after the fact, Freedom is still regarded as one of Neil's greatest works, backed by the lead single "Rockin' in the Free World", a song in which its message still rings true to this day.

My re-sequencing of Freedom is based upon the question of "what if Neil Young had released his songs as soon as he'd written them instead of waiting years to actually release them", and for this exercise, I'm focusing mostly on the stuff he'd written and recorded during 1988 and 1989. It's fairly similar to what I did with my own Hawks and Doves compilation that I'd created two years ago, although it is a bit dated due to the recent release of Archives Vol. 3: 1976-1987. So who knows if, whenever Archives Vol. 4 comes out, this re-sequenced Freedom will become dated itself?

Times Square (1989)

Side A (20:39)

1. Rockin' in the Free World (Live Acoustic) - 3:38 (Freedom)

2. Crime in the City (Sixty to Zero, Part 1) - 8:45 (Freedom)

3. Boxcar - 3:16 (Smell the Horse)

4. Don't Cry - 5:00 (Eldorado)

Side B (18:12)

5. Heavy Love - 5:09 (Eldorado)

6. Days That Used to Be - 3:42 (Ragged Glory)

7. Cocaine Eyes - 4:24 (Eldorado)

8. On Broadway - 4:57 (Freedom)

Side C (18:13)

9. Ordinary People - 18:13 (Chrome Dreams II)

Side D (14:53)

10. No More - 6:03 (Freedom)

11. Feel Your Love - 4:09 (American Dream)

12. Rockin' in the Free World (Electric) - 4:41 (Freedom)

First things first, I'm going to list the songs that have been dropped, all of which were written between 1975 and 1987. "Too Far Gone" is the oldest song on the album, being written as far back as the Zuma era, with "The Ways of Love" being considered for Comes a Time. "Eldorado" first started off as "Road of Plenty" in 1986, and was even performed that same year, and three more songs - "Hangin' on a Limb", "Someday" and "Wrecking Ball" - were all recorded in 1987 for Summer Songs. So that just leaves four songs - "Rockin' in the Free World" (two versions of it, anyway), "Crimes in the City", "Don't Cry" and "No More" - as well as a cover of the Drifters' "On Broadway" that were newly recorded for the end of the decade.

Filling in the gaps was not that hard since around that time, Neil Young had released an extended play called Eldorado which featured two songs that didn't appear on Freedom; those being "Heavy Love" and "Cocaine Eyes". Both tracks were also intended for an earlier version of Freedom titled Times Square, as did another song "Boxcar", which didn't appear on an album until Chrome Dreams II in 2007. Another version of "Boxcar" was later included on Smell the Horse in 2023, and that was the version I ended up using. If the 1988 recording ends up on Archives Vol. 4, then I will substitute it for that version instead, especially since the sound quality of the bootleg is rather rough.

I recently found out that "Days That Used to Be" was written in 1988, following the release of This Note's for You, but I'm not sure if it was recorded for Freedom or not. It did, however, end up on Ragged Glory in 1990, so I figured it was fair game for inclusion as well. Since it was recorded about a year after the final Freedom session, I doubt you'd hear much difference, anyway. Another outtake from 1988 is the eighteen minute epic "Ordinary People", which, like "Boxcar", was included on Chrome Dreams II, but it actually stayed in its 1988 form. The final piece to this puzzle was "Feel Your Love", which was one of Neil's four contributions to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's controversial American Dream album, which also contained two other songs from Summer Songs - "American Dream" and "Name of Love". (In case you're wondering, "This Old House", the fourth song, was first performed at Farm Aid in 1985.)

And now, it comes to putting the track listing together. I've taken cues from both the official Freedom track listing as well as the proposed track listing for Times Square, and went from there. The album starts off with the live acoustic version of "Rockin' in the Free World", followed up by "Crime in the City". "Boxcar" comes next per the Times Square sequencing, with Side A concluding with "Don't Cry", from which I've used the Eldorado version to add some variety.

With tracks 4-7 all being older songs, that left me free to create a whole new Side B from scratch, once again using the Time Square sequencing for reference. Those tracks being "Heavy Love", "Cocaine Eyes" and "On Broadway", with "Days That Used to Be" taking the place of "Wrecking Ball" as track six. "Ordinary People" takes up the entirety of Side C, and Side D begins with "No More", followed up by the acoustic "Feel Your Love" before concluding with the electric version of "Rockin' in the Free World", bringing this re-sequenced Freedom, now going by its original title Times Square, to a hard rocking close.

The final touch, of course, was the cover art. I deliberately designed it to resemble the pages of a newspaper, akin to Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, and I used an online site known as Canva in order to get the look that I wanted. I even went so far as to making the rear cover as well, that way every song had the lyrics to at least the first verse printed on the cover.

Overall, Times Square clocks in at pretty close to 72 minutes, which is pretty beefy for compact disc, with "Ordinary People" taking up a quarter of that length. Even if you take it out, it still makes for a very strong album by Neil Young, following the coattails of Rust Never Sleeps by ending the decade with a bang, one that's unquestionably justified considering the criticism his 80s output got. I've even put the album together myself as a YouTube playlist; try it out for yourself and see what you think!