Neil Young [is] the thirty-one-year-old loner who for more than 10 years has danced unflinchingly along the edge of that greatest of all precipices, Romance. Young is a romantic whose narcissistic mortification cuts so deep that his music—as evidenced by his latest release, the triple-disc retrospective, Decade—is among the most passionate in rock….

He's a committed malcontent approaching middle age, as indeed the whole rock form is, pressured to abandon the obsessions he has struggled with for so long.

Clearly, Young is a haunted dreamer who finds the world disappointing. In the early Seventies, he was given to overtly political statements …, but his most consuming grievance has been with women, the source of his most powerful illusions and frustrations. Young's creative history is a study in stubborn temperament at war with reality….

He also displayed a knack for reflective lyrics that stand up better than most of...