| Neil Young – Don't Let It Bring You Down Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Oh, okay. Let me just fill in your words, then. "Don't let it bring you down / It's only your hopes and dreams being desroyed / Find someone who's turning / and you will come around. Neil's advice: "C'mon keep your chin up, buddy. It's just everything you hope to be and accomplish in your life disappearing in front of your eyes." |
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| Neil Young – Don't Let It Bring You Down Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Sir, do you understand what you just said? Oh, no, I get it - you weren't saying anything! Keep doing that - you're a real contribution to society. | |
| Neil Young – Don't Let It Bring You Down Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Sir, I think you may have smoked too much dope. | |
| Neil Young – Don't Let It Bring You Down Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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bad perks of life? That's like saying "bitter sugar" or "negative benefits" See "perk" (perquisite) if you don't see what I mean. |
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| Neil Young – Don't Let It Bring You Down Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| I don't think he wanted to say " this shit goes on every day". Castles have burned - they're built to stand the test of time but they can come down. If Neil wanted to say: "this shit goes on every day" he would've written "Don't let it bring you down / it's only toilets flushing". Or something. | |
| Neil Young – Don't Let It Bring You Down Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Best rock and roll - yes. No argument there. Best sex and drugs? C'mon, you know that's just nostalgia. | |
| Neil Young – Don't Let It Bring You Down Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| "Castles made of Sand, fall in the sea, eventually" ~JH | |
| Neil Young – Don't Let It Bring You Down Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Yeah I agree with you but I don't even think he was going for any politics at all here. He has in lots of other songs: "Ohio", "Campaigner", "Rockin in the Free World", almost every song of the "Living with War" album... I don't think this song is even social commentary - aside from the fact that it paints a picture of modern life, life in an urban, technologically-driven society that has lost a little bit of it's soul, humanity, human-ness. It's a city scape: buildings, lorries (trucks, factories), red lights flashing, sirens, cold wind, alleys, morning newspaper... Old men, blind men, dead men in this cityscape are/were maybe homeless, victims - to some extent - of a cold, uncaring society. Maybe they had families, maybe they had ambition, dreams, happy lives. At one time they had many years in front of them, not behind them. We're supposed to see these things when NY sings about them because, you know, the world is tough. It can be a rough place for a lot of people; and difficult for almost all of us at one time or another. This picture that he paints gets that idea across. But how does the song end? With you finding - in an unlikely place - something to help you get back home. It's there, but you have to believe that it could be there. When you're down, when you're alone, when you've lost hope. What's that over in the gutter? | |
| Neil Young – Don't Let It Bring You Down Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Bill Hicks died back in 1994. | |
| Neil Young – Don't Let It Bring You Down Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Look, guys, forget the VIetnam stuff, forget the "protest song" nonsense, forget all of this over-analysis. 23-year-old Neil Young isn't thinking about ascribing all of this symbolism to the imagery. C'mon now. He wants the lyrics to be cool-sounding, he wants the visual picture a listener might get to be graphic, and in this case, mysterious, and he wants the song to speak to people in a positive way! That's what he's done his whole life! The song has got to sound good, too. But if the lyrics aren't cryptic and maybe a little bit dark - if the song JUST sounds good - then it isn't Neil Young - it's THE EAGLES. And who the hell wants to sit around listening to the Eagles? Not me. You've got to look at the chorus, first off, which is repeated and is the title of the song. Don't let it bring you down / it's only castles burning - like the Hendrix song "Castles made of Sand" - everything ends, everything eventually dies, everything goes back into the earth that gave birth to it. Even majestic, beautiful, powerful things like giant redwoods or manmade things like a castle. He could have said, "...it's only castles crumbling", but that wouldn't have sounded as cool. Plus, Neil has always had this theme of things burning - he likes that image. (e.g. song - "Burned", lyric from "Thrasher": "...burned my credit card for fuel..." "I Am a Child": "what is the color, when black is burned?" etc., etc. All the other lyrics in the verses are about the passage of time: being young/growing old (another Neil Young theme e.g. "Heart of Gold", "Old Man", etc.; life/death; having sight and understanding, being blind (not literaly but figuritively) to the world around us and gaining wisdom through experience and observation after having lived and paid attention. Neil is wanting to help us here, guys. Contibute to the betterment of human kind in some small way. If someone is bummed because they lost something or someone, or they're just lost in general, Neil has offered up this little gem to maybe shed a little light on things. Hey buddy, it's going to get better, life is like that -- but you can't give up on me, now. You're got to stay up. Have courage. After all, if you look for it, there's always a "white can lying in the gutter in the lane when you're walking home alone" |
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| Neil Young – Don't Let It Bring You Down Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Whew. That's a lot of analysis. Shouldn't you get back to work or something? No, seriously, Neil wasn't thinking about all those things, why would he? A lot of great songwriters - like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Roger Waters, etc. keep the lyrics intentionally abiguous so that their listeners can interpret the song any way they want to. They want to keep the meaning - to some extent - universal. Don't take my word for it - John Lennon says as much in the movie IMAGINE where he tells a fan "it ALL fits, man, when you're off on some trip." (He was referring to the song "Carry That Weight. "That said, they want the lyrics to have SOME meaning- to be about SOMETHING - but cryptic lyrics are almost always about peace, understanding, selflessness, love over hate, avoiding greed, avoiding hedonism, having courage when times are tough, etc. You know, "every little thing's gonna be alright" stuff. | |
| Neil Young – Don't Let It Bring You Down Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| But why would Neil write a song about "the establishment being questioned and brought down", then offer the advice to us that we shouldn't let it bring us down? Wouldn't Neil Young listeners be tickled to death that "the establishment" is crumbling? Mr. Young wouldn't write that anyway because he was smart enough even back then to know that the establishment isn't coming down in any significant way (Maybe after the infallibility of the U.S. Military (Vietnam defeat), Watergate and Nixon resigning in 1974 you could make an argument about the establishment being "brought down" - but this song was 1971.) Also, why would the"blind man" be a symbol of the government? The blind man has "an answer in his hand" - you're saying that NY is singing a song about the government having answers? That doesn't jive with your "castles burning/establishment crumbling" theory; or Neil Young's free-thinking hippie dreams in general | |
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