The songs on Freedom were written over the span of more than a decade. "Too Far Gone" dates to the Zuma era, and would be performed regularly in concert in 1976. "The Ways of Love" was written in the mid-1970s, attempted for Comes a Time, and first performed live during the May 1978 Boarding House concerts for Rust Never Sleeps. "Eldorado" would first appear as "Road of Plenty" in concert in 1986. Young would rehearse the song with Buffalo Springfield during a brief attempt at a reunion that year. "Someday", "Wrecking Ball" and "Hangin' on a Limb" appear on Summer Songs, a 1987 collection of solo performances
"Crime in the City" would first be performed and recorded with twelve verses as "Sixty to Zero". He wrote the song in 1988 while sailing in the Pacific: "I was in the middle of the ocean. I was sailboat sailing to Hawaii. I'd been out at sea almost 10 days - about halfway over there. I hadn't seen anybody for about 8 days - no planes, no other boats - just the horizon. So I was pretty spacey out there by then. In one night I wrote three songs: 'Ordinary People', 'Sixty To Zero' and 'Days That Used To Be'.
The next one, "Don't Cry" was inspired by a relationship of Niko Bolas' that had fallen apart. The music was influenced by Roy Orbison. "Rockin' in the Free World" originates with a phrase Young borrowed from guitarist Poncho Sampedro. Sampedro would explain: "We were on the road with the Lost Dogs in 1989. I was riding on Neil's bus at the time. I was his cook on the bus, so we were hanging out 24/7. All this stuff was going down with the Ayatollah. I don’t know if you remember that footage of them passing the casket along over the heads of thousand and thousands of people. There was a lot of 'Hate America' demonstrations and we were supposed to do this exchange. We were going to Russia for the first time. It was a cultural exchange. They were getting us in exchange for the Russian Ballet. And it just fell through. Neil was like, 'Damn, I really wanted to go.' I said, 'Me too. I guess we’ll have to keep on rockin’ in the free world.' He was like, 'Wow, that’s a cool line.' Then I said it again later and he said, 'That’s a really good phrase. I wanna use it.' He told me he was going to use it. The next day he came up to me and told me to check out this lyric sheet.
The first songs recorded for the album were "Someday" and "Crime in the City". Young recorded the songs at his home studio at Broken Arrow Ranch in late July 1988. After the completion of the Bluenotes tour in December 1988, Young booked time at the Hit Factory in Times Square, New York with bassist Rick Rosas and drummer Chad Cromwell, the rhythm section from the previous tour. The trio recorded the songs "Heavy Love", "Wrecking Ball", "Cocaine Eyes", "Don't Cry", "On Broadway", "Eldorado" and "Boxcar". Young sequenced an early version of Freedom from these songs plus the earlier "Someday" and "Crime in the City" with a proposed title of Times Square. Instead of releasing the album, Young embarked on a tour of Australia and then Japan with the Restless plus Ben Keith and Poncho Sampedro. He would dub this band The Lost Dogs. To promote the tour, Young released a five-song EP of the Hit Factory songs, Eldorado. The release was limited to Australia and Japan.
Young would perform the songs "Rockin' in the Free World", "The Needle and the Damage Done" and "No More" live in September 1989 for the television show Saturday Night Live. For the performance, Young played with Poncho Sampedro, Charley Drayton and Steve Jordan. Comedian Dennis Miller would later say that "Rockin' in the Free World" was the single greatest performance on the show in its history.
The album received mainly positive reviews, especially in comparison to the rest of Young's '80s work. it was the album Neil Young fans knew he was capable of making, but feared he would never make again, with a balanced combination of the folk ditties and rock galumph that made Neil Young famous.
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