Expecting to Fly

I heard this song in a dream ...... shortly after after a female friend of over 40 years died unexpectedly . I loved her from the day I met her and never told her because I was afraid to screw up such a beautiful friendship . This probably wasn't the meaning Neil Young had in mind ... But now I can't listen to the song without thinking of her and all the great times we had together ... Damn , I miss her .

My mom thought it was about seeing your children grow up and move away. Re-reading the lyrics, I don't think that's what the author meant, but I feel like interpreting it that way -- now that I am a mother watching my own children grow up, and some move away -- has a lot more emotional meaning for me than yet another lost love/breakup song.

Nobody comments on this fuckin' song?! SERIOUSLY?! what the hell. it's beauty. apparently it's about some chick he was with and he saw that she was with some other guy.

It didn't actually say any where in the song that she left him for soeone else. Where did you hear that??

Perhaps he was woundering if he should or should not say goodbye. Maybe he felt hard done by.

"If I never lived without you, Now you know I'd die." This line suggests that she gave him such strength that he wouldn't be able to live without her. But in reality, I'm sure he'd have got on just fine, unless of course he's suggesting that he was thinking of committing suicide, & she convinced him not to.

"If I never said I loved you, Now you know I'd try" Perhaps he never found the courage to say he loved her, & regrets it, and perhaps that's why he lost her.

She now knows he'd try, possibly because he got drunk some night & revealed the way he felt for her, while strumbling and reaching out in desperation, but to late.

My interpretation may sound weird, but that's what I picked up from it.

My dad said this is about heroin addiction...?

In my mind this is not a "lost love" song. But a "lost state of mind" song?!

More specifically the confusion people had to experience after realizing that the hippie way of living was definetly gone...

Heck; I know this is a long shot but give it a try

Interesting to hear this on the soundtrack of the Jennifer Lawrence movie 'Joy'.

To me it just sounds like the typical emotions of a young guy who set up his life around a girl and how he felt as the events unfolded and his expectations fell apart.

I get a kick out of how every 60's and 70's song is about drugs, Richard Nixon, or some other weird thing. I suppose it could be , but I'm going with Occam's Razor on this one until Young says differently.

This is exactly the way I was thinking in my early 20's when the dream girl decided I wasn't the one and moved on.

I heard this when I was about 15 in the early seventies, for whatever reason his girl has left him and he is devastated and it is simple as that.

I think this song is a reflection written to a former love that possibly was ended by him to pursue his music career. "If I never lived without you" I would have died in obscurity never pursuing his dream. After "years spent with feeling" it was painful having to choose but "by the end of summer" he felt he was healing. Maybe as times got hard he was having second thoughts wanting reasurrance of "the love he found knowing it was gone" and trying to laugh it off. He is reaffirming the love he had. He never really committed to the love but "now you know I'd try.

The singer is looking back on a romance that has ended, probably a youthful one in which they were together for a long time and very dependent on each other. In the first stanza, she leaves him (and is expecting to fly, which he finds laughable). He is hurting, but begins to heal from this loss. He still thinks of the sad way it ended ("ended with a cry") and is not fully recovered ("stumbled", "fumbled"), but he knows that it is over ("knowing it was gone").

Check out the double negative in this line: "If I never lived without you | Now you know I'd die." In other words if he had ended up stuck with her permanently, it would have been the end of him, so it is just as well that it is over. But he still wants her to know that he loved her, even if he was not very good at telling her.

A beautiful, sensitive song, a little mournful and vulnerable, like a lot of Young's ballads. I wonder if this was about Pam Smith, who (I think) was his teen years girlfriend. There is a photo of them together in Young's autobiography.