On How Synchronicity Is Jungian Pseudo-Science: Neil Young “Harvest Moon”

On it’s face, the idea of synchronicity is a lovely thing. Carl Jung is credited with first describing the concept, where two or more seemingly unrelated things happen for some reason. Being Jung, he credited this to mystical origins. The problem is, the human brain is often stronger than the unknowable mystic forces of the universe (you know, if those exist). 

More times than not synchronicity can be chalked up to paying attention. These things were all around you anyway, but if someone mentions elephants to you, you are more likely to start noticing elephants. It’s all suggestion.

I started to wonder, 6 to 9 months ago, if my whole generation hadn’t just discovered an appreciation for Neil Young at the same time. It’s only because I finally tripped and fell face-first over the brilliance of his Harvest and After the Gold Rush albums and then started digging deeper. Now it feels like Neil Young is everywhere — as though the majority of people I know started talking about him around the same time, or wanted to tell stories about discovering him, or just proclaim his genius. 

That is patently not the case, however. There was a Neil Young revival in the ’90s circa the “This Bud’s For You” incident and the Pearl Jam duet on “Rockin’ in the Free World.” There was probably one in the ’00s that I can’t quite culturally pinpoint, on a smaller scale. People have been discovering and rediscovering Neil Young since long before I was alive and with any luck will keep doing it. This is not a mystical force, at least no more mystical than any force that propelled him to write such great songs.

I’m much more excited by the symmetry of pulling one’s head out of the sand than from a mystical entity.

Unless any mystical entities are reading this.

Women you should know about: Emmylou Harris.

Last night I was reading my book, replying to emails and listening to Emmylou Harris’s new album on NPR music. It took less than one song, because the first song was that compelling, for me to stop everything I was doing and read what NPR had written about her. The first sentence is her saying how difficult songwriting is, still, for her. They manage to make it all the way to the second paragraph before they mention Gram Parsons, whose connection with Harris in the ’70s is often credited (even by Harris herself) as the reason any of us know who she is. And that’s fine, but we all know Grievous Angel would have been only half the album it is without Harris. And, frankly, she probably would have met the right people or caught the right ear at some point with a voice like hers. Hell, Parsons wasn’t even the first to discover her — his fellow/former Flying Burrito Brothers band member Chris Hillman actually has that honor and in turn recommended her to Parsons to help fill out his vocals.

At any rate, what reading this made me flash on was a throwaway line in Keith Richard’s book Life, where he expounds on his relationship with Parsons before and during the recording of Exile on Main Street. He says something along the lines of, “this was before Gram met Emmylou and well before there was anything going on between them, but there would be.” And something about the way he wrote it, the context it was in, makes it feel like Emmylou Harris owes her career to Gram Parsons wanting to have sex with her.

Here’s the problem I have with that: I couldn’t tell you the name of one person Neil Young has had sex with. And, critically speaking, that is who Harris is on par with, both in terms of the quality & quantity of her output and the level of respect she deserves. And yet all we do is talk about her relationship to Gram Parsons. No one feels the need to write about CSNY every time they do a think piece on Neil Young. I’m sure some of the romance comes from envoking the untimely and mysterious death of Parsons, but Harris has been recording since the late ’60s and has a rich backstory of her own. And she had enough gumption to make sure her career carried on when he was gone. So can’t we start talking about Emmylou Harris on her own yet?

The song above is Emmylou Harris’s “Together Again” performed on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977.