neil young on the meaning of tell me why?

Had the screenplay from which After the Gold Rush took its name been made into a movie, it would have ended with a tidal wave looming over the California coast.

When Young sings “After the Gold Rush” live, as he has done at hundreds (if not thousands) of shows in the half-century since he wrote it, he is almost always alone at his piano he plays the French horn part on harmonica and changes “ In the 1970s” to “ In the 21st century.” (He has occasionally performed it with his loyal steed of a backing band, Crazy Horse, which offers definitive evidence that he was right to record the song without them for the album.) Still, the song never sounds quite as wistful as it does on the album, where its French horn and original lyric might as well be encased in amber. The song’s piano melody is as delicate as it is devastating, and the French horn that manifests at its midpoint sounds fuzzy and indistinct, as if it’s swaddled in fog or a heavy blanket. The medieval scene Young envisions in the first verse is interrupted by curious warning to “ Look at Mother Nature on the run/ In the 1970s” before fast-forwarding several centuries on the final verse, a dream of the evacuation of the planet amid ecological catastrophe.

It plays like a lyrical game of exquisite corpse, spinning three vignettes that span the past, present and future in under four minutes. The title track to Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush is one of his most surreal songs, as well as one of his most beloved.

Neil young on the meaning of tell me why?