A Love Letter to Neil Young

Cortez the Killer is a historical song. It depicts just a single slice of frozen time in the March of 1519, but with a seven-and-a-half-minute runtime it takes it slow: opening with a brooding, meandering, mournful, and sick-as-hell guitar solo. The fateful meeting of Moctezuma Xocoyotzin and Cortez portended by the song’s title is yet to happen. Events that to us as listeners are obvious historical fact are, to the Aztecs, in the unknowable future; they go about their lives—carrying stones, building an empire—unaware of the historical inevitability that awaits them, their collision course with destiny. Neil Young confronts the listener with a sickening dramatic irony; juxtaposed to the serene depiction of Aztec life is the image of Cortez, just out on the Gulf, gaily “dancing upon the water with his galleons and guns,” on a descent towards the innocent like the earth-shattering Chicxulub meteor that fell on that same Gulf fifty million years before. While Neil’s guitar cries out, we are forced to sit in this pregnant moment between potentiality and actuality that precedes all annihilations. It is a reminder of the depravity of man, what may be awaiting us at any moment, and the forces of history before which we can only cower impotently.

Then something bizarre happens. Neil pulls us out of the moment of tension, out of history, space and time; he utters this, the song’s penultimate stanza:

And I know she's living there
And she loves me to this day
I still can't remember when
Or how I lost my way

The narrator—Neil—speaks to us in autobiography; he was there. He was there, in March 1519, watching the Aztecs, the woman he loves, and Cortez. Of course, he’s always been here on this continent, almost surely in various forms. His is the voice of this North American breeze. Neil is prolific and he is infinite. He’s released 45 studio albums and 22 live albums. He’s much more than the godfather of grunge, as he’s called by some; he’s every artist’s favorite artist. He will always be here: he will be present on the breath of every singer and in the quiver of every guitar string; he will be here in the wind and song of this continent until it sinks into the sea, just as he always has been. He will neither burn out nor fade away. Neil Young is here to stay.

The first version of this song I’d heard was the live Slint version, and for a while had no idea it was even a cover. This was the song that brought me back to Neil Young with a new appreciation—he had done in 1975 what I thought Slint was so cool for doing on Spiderland in 1991. It’s clear that this old Canadian has influenced and will influence some of the greatest American music ever. Folk music, rock music, and all of their lovechildren will never be the same after Neil.

—T.M.
Feb 14, 2026