Neil Young - Hawks & Doves

The 10th studio album by rock icon Neil Young.  By the end of the '70s, Neil Young's fans had been trained to expect constant change, but his creative shifts from album to album could still be painfully jarring. Hawks & Doves is a prime example, writes Ultimate Classic Rock. Hawks & Doves features somewhat awkwardly bolted together sessions from different periods.

Side one, dubbed "Doves," rescued a handful of tracks from Young's aborted 1975 Homegrown LP, while the "Hawks" side consisted of more recent songs, recorded earlier in the year, with a pronounced country bent. The entire nine-track collection clocked in a few seconds shy of half an hour in length.

The Hawks tracks presented a side of Young that made many longtime fans uncomfortable. Long seen as a standard bearer for the counterculture movement, Young seemed to pull an about face with songs such as "Union Man," which took a biting swipe at the musicians' union, and the title track, which included cries of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" and the lines "Got rock and roll, got country music playing' / If you hate us, you just don't know what you're sayin'." Coming from one of the men responsible for the protest anthem "Ohio" — and on the eve of Ronald Reagan's election as President of the United States — it stung some listeners as a betrayal of '60s ideals.

 

Side 1

Little Wing

The Old Homestead

Lost in Space

Captain Kennedy

Side 2

Stayin' Power

Coastline

Union Man

Comin' Apart at Every Nail

Hawks & Doves

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