Song · Live covers
After the Gold Rush
Neil Young's end-of-the-world piano ballad, played in 2002 and 2003, most often as the way into “Everything in Its Right Place”.
1970
silver spaceships
Young wrote it for the album of the same name. In his 2012 autobiography he traced it to an unproduced screenplay by Dean Stockwell and Herb Bermann in which California is destroyed by a flood; the title refers to the gold rush. Dolly Parton, who recorded it with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, has said Young himself does not know what it is about.
Its three verses move forward in time: a medieval scene, then the singer lying in a burned-out basement, then chosen people leaving the Earth in silver spaceships. The line about Mother Nature on the run gets updated whenever he plays it, and has been “in the 21st century” for years now. Rolling Stone ranks it 323rd among the greatest songs ever written.
2002–03
four nights
The archive has it on four nights. Yorke sang it at the Bridge School Benefit in Mountain View on 26 October 2002, where it closed his set, and the band played it in a session broadcast from Electric Lady Studios in New York on 4 June 2003.
The others are 2003 shows where Yorke sang it as the way into “Everything in Its Right Place”: the Beacon Theatre in New York on 6 June, the Arènes de Nîmes on 14 July and the UMB Bank Pavilion outside St Louis on 24 August. The hand logs of those nights write the two songs as one line, and the archive counts both.
the video
Their Neil Young cover.· formengrwatch on youtube →
takes(2)
Live history
| Times played | 4 shows |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Wednesday 4 June 2003 · New York |
| Last played | Sunday 24 August 2003 · Maryland Heigths |
Nights played include broadcasts; opened and closed count gigs only. A cancelled night has no setlist. All setlist stats →
sources4
- Neil Young, Waging Heavy Peace, 2012.
- Nick Hasted, “The story behind the song: Neil Young, ‘After the Gold Rush’”, Louder, 12 November 2016.
- “The 500 greatest songs of all time”, Rolling Stone, 15 September 2021.
- Performance dates from this site's own setlist archive: setlist.fm, and the 2003 site's hand logs for the nights it led into “Everything in Its Right Place”.