Harvest Moon

Harvest Moon is the nineteenth studio album by Neil Young, released in November 1992 on Reprise Records and produced by Young and Ben Keith, an explicit companion to the 1972 Harvest album, recorded with many of the same musicians (Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor returning for backing vocals, Spooner Oldham, Ben Keith) and deploying the same acoustic, country-folk framework to revisit the themes of middle age that Harvest had addressed from early adulthood. Young wrote all original material; the title track, a gentle, slow-dance waltz about enduring love, was the lead single and reached the top twenty on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Young's most commercially significant single in years; 'From Hank to Hendrix' and 'Unknown Legend' addressed the experience of long-term partnership with the same autobiographical directness. The album debuted at number 16 on the Billboard 200 and reached number three in Canada, Young's home country, becoming his highest-charting album in a decade; it was certified platinum in the United States and received warmer critical reception than most of his 1980s work. Harvest Moon is generally regarded as Young's most successful artistic and commercial return, a genuine reunion with the acoustic country-folk idiom rather than a nostalgic exercise, and it demonstrated that the emotional intelligence and melodic invention of Harvest had not diminished in the intervening two decades. The album's commercial success, the best-charting Young album in over a decade, demonstrated that the audience he had built through his most celebrated work of the 1970s had remained loyal through the deliberately uncommercial experiments of the 1980s, and that the acoustic country-folk idiom remained his most commercially accessible mode whenever he chose to inhabit it.