Silver & Gold (Neil Young album)

Silver & Gold is the 23rd studio album by Canadian / American musician Neil Young, released on April 25, 2000. Like the previous albums Comes a Time and Harvest Moon and the subsequent Prairie Wind, it largely features acoustic performances with a backing band of Nashville musicians with a long history of collaboration with Young.

Silver & Gold
Studio album by Neil Young
Released	April 25, 2000
Recorded	August 26, 1997 – May 28, 1999
Studio	Redwood Digital, Woodside, CA (except "Buffalo Springfield Again" and "The Great Divide": Arlyn Studios, Austin TX)
Genre	Folk rock, country rock
Length	39:02
Label	Reprise
Producer	Neil Young, Ben Keith
Neil Young chronology
Year of the Horse (1997) Silver & Gold (2000) Road Rock Vol. 1 (2000)

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[1]
Robert Christgau	C+[2]

The bulk of the album was written and recorded in the late 1990s after touring with Crazy Horse on the H.O.R.D.E. Festival. Young enjoyed writing and performing quieter music after the volume of the band performances. He would explain in a March 2000 radio interview: "I wrote ("Good to See You") in my bus in Florida somewhere. There was a thunderstorm and the HORDE tour was playing. And, you know, we had to shut down for half an hour or something. And so I went to my bus and I was in the back. And my voice was real low ‘cause I’d been playing with Crazy Horse and screaming and yelling and carrying on. So my voice was real low. And I wrote these- a couple of songs. "Good to See You" was one of them. And "Without Rings"."[3]

Two of the songs date from the early 1980s. The title track, "Silver and Gold", dates from 1981, while "Razor Love" was first recorded and performed in 1984. Producing a satisfactory recording of "Silver and Gold" had alluded Young over the years, as he explained in a March 2000 radio interview:

"Well, "Silver and Gold" I think I wrote back in - I don't know 1981 or '82. And I did record it several times. I tried it several ways. And it was such a nice - it's just such a song, you know. It just kind of lives with the guitar. It's just there. And it's always a kind of song you do it the first time, its fine, it sounds great. And then you do it the second time and it's like, you know, why are you doing it again? You just - you've already done it. It's such a simple thing that either you - I would get it right the first time and then by the time the band knew it, it sounded so contrived to me that I could never get it. So I really recorded, I think, a total of 11 times with different people in all kinds of different configurations. And we got 'em all, none of them are worth listening to. But this one here finally just got back to the roots of it and just sat down with my guitar and played it and said, 'That's it.' Because I love the song and I feel the song now and it means something to me now. And so I just did it. When I got back from the HORDE tour a couple of years ago, I went in the studio, sat down and did this one the second day after I was back, I think."[4]

The album was recorded concurrently with the CSNY album Looking Forward, released the previous year. Three of its songs, "Looking Forward", "Slowpoke" and "Out of Control" were first considered for Silver & Gold. Young allowed the band to review the album and choose songs that would better suit the group effort. Young found that sharing those songs helped solidify a running order for the remaining songs into a more cohesive album:

"My songs that they picked from my selection from - that I had recorded for Silver and Gold, they took three of my songs. I thought they came out really well. I like the way they sang on 'em and everything. It sounds really good to me. And the funny thing is, when those songs were taken from the mix, were taken from the other songs, they - the songs that were left were - you know, there were too many songs. And they were all - originally there were too many songs for Silver and Gold. And they were all struggling and kind of holding each other down. And when CSN picked those three songs out and then I was left with the other ten or eleven, they suddenly just fell into place. It was really a great feeling, because I was struggling with trying to put it together. And when they took those three songs out, it just - everything else was left. I mean, I just wrote them out in order of what I wanted to hear and that was it. It never changed again. The running order was right. Everything was right. So there was something about it that was really right, where you give something away and you get something back. You know, it's like a reward for sharing or something. I don't know. It's a good feeling.[5]

Young promoted the album with a solo acoustic tour of the United States. The tour featured both new songs and older songs performed in unique ways, including banjo and piano performances. The show from Bass Concert Hall in Austin, Texas was professionally recorded and filmed by director L.A. Johnson. A DVD of the performance, also titled Neil Young: Silver and Gold was released June 15th, 2000.[6] An acoustic performance of "Cortez the Killer" from the March 20th show at Oakland's Paramount Theatre was provided to Cameron Crowe for use in the movie Almost Famous.[7]

The album was a nominee for Roots & Traditional Album of the Year – Solo at the 2001 Juno Awards.[8] The album art is a photo taken by Neil's daughter Amber with the Game Boy Camera.[9]

The U.S. release uses HDCD encoding.[10]