Freedom is the 17th studio album by Canadian-American musician Neil Young, released on October 2, 1989. Freedom relaunched Young's career after a largely unsuccessful decade. After many arguments and a lawsuit, Young left Geffen Records in 1988 and returned to his original label, Reprise, with This Note's for You. Freedom brought about a new, critical and commercially successful album. It was released as an LP record, cassette tape, and CD.
Writing
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. "El Dorado" 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 of eight new songs that Young would release on his website on Christmas Day, 2021
"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'.
"Don't Cry" was inspired by a relationship of Niko Bolas' that had fallen apart. The music was influenced by Roy Orbison. According to Young in a November 1990 Vox interview with Nick Kent: "I've always put a piece of Roy Orbison on every album I've made. His influence is on so many of my songs. I even had his photograph on the sleeve of Tonight's The Night for no reason, really. Just recognizing his presence. There's a big Orbison tribute song on Eldorado called Don't Cry. That's totally me under the Roy Orbison spell. When I wrote it and recorded it I was thinking 'Roy Orbison meets trash metal'"
"Rockin' in the Free World" originates with a phrase Young borrowed from guitarist Poncho Sampedro. Sampedro would explain in a 2013 interview for Rolling Stone: "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. I only questioned one of them. I think it was 'Keep Hope Alive' or something. He said, 'No, no, no. That’s a good one.' We just started singing it and he taught me the harmony part. That night we played it in Seattle. It was this cool theater. We didn’t even rehearse it with the band. I was telling the chords to [bassist] Rick Rosas as we went along."
Recording
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, in between sessions for the CSNY album American Dream The sessions took place during a break in the tour supporting This Note's for You, and feature performers from his touring band. "Ordinary People" from Chrome Dreams II was also recorded at this time, as was a driving, electric version of "Crime in the City". Both the electric version and the acoustic album version were recorded as "Sixty to Zero" with all verses. The album take was later edited to remove the first half of the verses. Young explained the edit in a contemporary interview for Dutch radio: "It's too long as one thing. It's meant to stand by itself, not to be played with anything else. If I play the long version in concert, it's too overpowering. If you can imagine listening to anything for 18 minutes, it disturbs the flow. It's too much of the same thing so I do the short version.