Decade (Neil Young album)
Decade is a compilation album by Canadian-American musician Neil Young, originally released in 1977 as a triple album, now available on two compact discs. It contains 35 of Young's songs recorded between 1966 and 1976, among them five tracks that had been unreleased up to that point. It peaked at No. 43 on the "Billboard" Top Pop Albums chart, and was certified platinum by the RIAA in 1986. History. Compiled by Young himself, with his hand-written liner notes about each track, "Decade" represents almost every album from his career and various affiliations through  1977 with the exception of "4 Way Street" and "Time Fades Away". Of the previously unreleased songs, "Down to the Wire" features the New Orleans pianist Dr. John with Buffalo Springfield on an item from their shelved "Stampede" album; "Love Is a Rose" was a minor hit for Linda Ronstadt in 1975; "Winterlong" received a cover by Pixies on the Neil Young tribute album from 1989, ""; and "Campaigner" is a Young song critical of Richard Nixon. The track "Long May You Run" is a different mix to that found on the album of the same name, featuring the harmonies of  the full Crosby Stills & Nash before David Crosby and Graham Nash left the recording sessions. For many years, "Decade" was the only Neil Young compilation album available. A 1993 compilation called "Lucky Thirteen" was released, but it only covered Young's 1982–1988 output. It was not until 2004 that Reprise Records released a single-disc retrospective of his best-known tracks, titled "Greatest Hits". Throughout the 1980s and '90s, Young promised fans a follow-up to the original "Decade" collection, provisionally titled "Decade II"; eventually, this idea was scrapped in favor of a much more comprehensive anthology to be titled  Archives, spanning his entire career and ranging in size from a box set to an entire series of audio and/or video releases. The first release of archival material since "Decade" and "Lucky Thirteen" would appear in 2006, "Live at the Fillmore East", a recording from a 1970 concert featuring Crazy Horse with Danny Whitten. Several other archival live releases followed, and in 2009 the first of several planned multi-disc box sets, "The Archives Vol. 1 1963–1972", was issued. In April 2017 "Decade" was reissued on vinyl as a limited-edition Record Store Day release, with remastered vinyl and CD  editions planned for general release in June 2017. Alternate early version. Initially, "Decade" was to be released in 1976, but was pulled at the last minute by Young. It was shelved until the following year, where it appeared with two songs removed from the original track list (a live version of "Don't Cry No Tears" recorded in Japan in 1976, and a live version of "Pushed It Over the End" recorded in 1974). Also removed were the following comments on those two songs and "Time Fades Away", from Young's handwritten liner notes: Reception. The album has been lauded  in many quarters as one of the best examples of a career retrospective for a rock artist, and as a template for the box set collections that would follow in the 1980s and beyond. However, in the original article on Young from the first edition of the "Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll" and a subsequent article in the "1983 Rolling Stone Record Guide", critic Dave Marsh used this album to accuse Young of deliberately manufacturing a self-mythology, arguing that while his highlights could be seen to place him on a level with other artists from his  generation like Bob Dylan or The Beatles, the particulars of his catalogue did not bear this out. The magazine has since excised the article from subsequent editions of the "Illustrated History" book. Track listing. All songs written by Neil Young.