Shoal Music: No.1 Neil Young’s ‘Midnight On The Bay’

The first of a regular feature where we reflect on the sea themed songs by a popular artists. Here music critic Tim Gadhorn digs up Neil Young's 1976 song Midnight On The Bay.

Neil Young is better known for his pastoral portraits of harvest moons, country homes & prairie winds but it should be no surprise, with a career filled with diversions, that his journey across country allows for the occasional coastal deviation.

Neil's love of the sea is apparent all the way from 1965s exotica influenced Kahuna Sunset, recorded with Buffalo Springfield, complete with wave & bird sounds to the nautical classics of Sail Away & Through My Sails. While 1974's Hawks & Doves has the pacific duo of Captain Kennedy and Coastline & 1995's Mirror Ball had I Am The Ocean and lest we forget that one of his most celebrated (and doom laden) albums was christened breezily On The Beach.

However the most consistent layover in coastal country must be the 1976 album Long May You Run recorded with Stephen Stills. The duo took to the studio following the failed attempts to record a full Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album in the wake of their giant 1974 stadium tour.

Reuniting without the rest of CSN for the first time since Buffalo Springfield, the result was anything but a return to roots and instead offered a slick brew of mid 70's Pacific blues.

The Stills/Young band would blow up shortly after recording (keeping par with most of CSNY's formations) and the album sounds like a bad trip in every sense; part heatstroke, part hangover, complete with it's own horror hotel stay song, the overwrought Fontainebleau.

Stills' offerings include the intensely weird Black Coral, an over polished groove about descending to the bottom of the ocean to find Jesus. While critical consensus suggests Young’s songs are also slight outside of the pleasing Beach Boys-esque title track.

This assessment however ignores a couple of forgotten gems. Ocean Girl is like the best type of Jimmy Buffet song; a swooning wooing ballad where Young promises a mysterious Ocean Girl, ‘They'll be drinking bananas/ from long tall glasses in the open air.’

While Midnight On The Bay is a soulful sweet piece of shoal music that indulges Young’s love of Stax soul. A simple lyric but a beautiful song that sounds as soft as a sea swept breeze at midnight. It's warm and close as holding a conch shell to your ear. A forgotten treasure and Neil at his most beguiling... Listen below...