Before he launched onto a career of fifty-odd (some very odd!) albums in fifty years, Neil Young was one fifth of a West Coast band of the kind they don’t seem to make any more. Three-fifths of that band became prominent figures in the music of the Seventies, Steven Stills as part of Crosby, Stills and Nash, sometimes incorporating his Canadian ex-partner and Richie Furay as leader and driver of the underrated Poco. I mean neither of them any disrespect if I suggest that, in longevity terms, Neil Young is the one who really counts.
The band they all graced was Buffalo Springfield, noted for such Stills songs as the protest-heavy ‘For What It’s Worth’ and the bright and buoyant ‘Rock’n’Roll Woman’. It’s songs like that, upfront and fitted to their times, that stand out, and the band contributed heavily to the development of folk-rock, as well as incorporating a mixture of genres into their acclaimed style.
It’s not just Young’s work with the band that attracts me to Buffalo Springfield but it’s fair to say that it is his songs that attract me the most, and in particular, the extraordinarily beautiful ‘Expecting to Fly’ from the band’s second album, Buffalo Springfield Again.
The song is a haunting, delicate experience, with Young’s cracked-falsetto vocals at their sweetest and most plaintive, and the song is a fragile ballad of loss, of regret for someone leaving, and for all the things remaining unsaid. It is, in practical terms, a Neil Young solo, for his is the only voice heard on the song, and the instrumentation is a deep, slow, aching orchestration put together by Jack Nitzche over Young’s strummed acoustic guitar and delicate electric guitar figures.
The track introduces itself by means of a low drone, growing in intensity until the first taste of strings intrudes upon the sound. Young uses the acoustic guitar to create, not a rhythm but a sense of momentum whilst leaving his electric contributions to be complemented by Nitzche’s strings. But it is the picture he paints, the story he outlines, that goes to the heart. From: https://mbc1955.wordpress.com/2021/12/06/the-infinite-jukebox-buffalo-springfields-expecting-to-fly/
