Dia Reeves

So I’ve been listening to “Old Man” by Neil Young a lot lately. Probably because I’ve been watching the documentary Dogtown a lot–not so much for the skateboarding as for the soundtrack. Anyway, I read somewhere that Young claims “Old Man” is about the janitor who worked for him, which I found very disappointing. Because to me, the song is about a (somewhat angry) son trying to get his father to acknowledge him as a person. But my interpretation isn’t based on anything except my crap relationship (relationship might be the wrong word) with my own father.

It’s impossible to have an opinion about something without revealing a part of yourself, isn’t it? And it’s also impossible to put something out in the world and say, okay this is what this is about and nothing more. Because people always internalize everything and come up with their own narrative, despite the creator’s original intent.

So Neil Young and his janitor can both suck it, I guess. I like my interpretation, and I’m sticking with it.

And I totally thought Neil Young wrote this song. Turns out, there’s some dude floating around out there called Neil Diamond. Who knew?

Tags: Music

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.