Sugar Mountain (song)

"Sugar Mountain" is a song by Canadian folk rock singer and composer Neil Young. Young composed the song on his 19th birthday in 1964, and its lyrics are reminiscences about his youth in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Meaning of the lyrics

In her album "You Can Close Your Eyes", Joni Mitchell, who was already friends with Neil Young by the time he wrote this song, opened her song "Circle Game" with this speech:

:"Mitchell: "In 1965 I was up in Canada, and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a rock'n'roll band (...) he had just newly turned 21, and that meant he was no longer allowed into his favorite hangout, which was kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you're over 21 you couldn't get in there anymore; so he was really feeling terrible because his girlfriends and everybody that he wanted to hang out with, his band could still go there, you know, but it's one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn't play in this club anymore. But he was over the hill. So he wrote this song that was called "Oh to live on sugar mountain" which was a lament for his lost youth. (...) And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 21 and there's nothing after that, that's a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It's called The Circle Game." [http://www.thrasherswheat.org/jammin/jammin_more.htm#joni Neil Young Collaborations ] ]

Releases

Young first recorded the song on November 10, 1968, as part of a live performance at the Canterbury House club in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This recording was released as the B-side of Young's 1970 single "The Loner" (and again as the B-side of the "Cinnamon Girl" single later that year), but was not collected on an album until the 2-record compilation "Decade" was released in 1977. A 2-CD release of recordings from the Canterbury House performance, "Sugar Mountain - Live at Canterbury House 1968", is scheduled for release in November 2008 as part of Young's ongoing "Archives Performance Series".

A live acoustic rendition is included as the first track of Young's 1979 album "Live Rust".

References