"I remember when we were kids, I'd meet Neil every day on the corner to walk to school together and he'd have his white bucks on and his transistor radio just blaring out," Smith told Uncut magazine. In Sharry Wilson's Neil Young: The Sugar Mountain Years, she uncovered that Young and Smith trace their musical discoveries to this very school. On the song "Don't be Denied," from Time Fades Away, Young recounts sitting on the steps of Lawrence Park Collegiate with his friend, Comrie Smith. Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute, 125 Chatsworth Dr., Toronto 1959-1960 So they've got pictures of Neil in the house and sitting on the steps and stuff like that." The house is located near a river and train tracks, undoubtedly instilling Young's lifelong fascination with both. "They knocked on the door and asked 'Hey, can I come in?'. "Neil passed through during the '90s with his own actual family, just to show his kids where he lived and where he grew up," the realtor told the Toronto Star. When the two-acre property that Young called home for seven years, until he was eight, was recently listed for sale, the realtor was sure to include a picture of Young sitting on the steps with his children. From his childhood home in a town in North Ontario to his first recording in Winnipeg to his final moments before setting out for Los Angeles and skyrocketing to fame, this is Neil Young's Canada. "Where the Canada geese once filled the sky/ and then I won't be far from home."īelow, we look at the key places, moments and lyrics that show the influence Canada had on Young. "Bury me out on the prairie/ where the buffalo used to roam," he sings. On his 2005 song "Far From Home," he affirms this love and longing for the country of his birth. Young may have left Canada, physically, in the '60s, but his spiritual connections run as deep as Manitoba's Red River. "Songs like 'Rockin' in the Free World' or 'Change Your Mind' - you think there might be something Canadian in the ambiguity of those songs? Yeah. See how other people could figure out why what you're saying is wrong before you're so sure you're right," he writes. "There's something in Canada that teaches you that you always gotta look at both sides. But he was also inspired by what he refers to as the Canadian tendency to consider all sides of the story, sometimes to the point of paralysis. He spent his formative years here, inspired by small towns and big highways, constantly moving with his family from city to city and across provinces, then travelling to gigs in Manitoba and Ontario in his early days as a musician. "I'm proud to be a Canadian - but I don't let it hold me back," Neil Young said in his 2002 biography, Shakey, a stance that has, over his 50-plus year career, put him in a unique relationship with his home country.
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