Neil Young breaks silence on song he ‘accidentally’ plagiarized

Neil Young has provided the music world with over a thousand songs during his six decades long career.

His discography is packed to the rafters and is as diverse as any in modern music. While it contains some of the defining anthems of countless generations, it also has a series of missteps, too.

He’s always striving for something new, pioneering folk harmonies in the 1960s before becoming the Godfather of Grunge in the next decade.

For a while, in the 1960s especially, artists were often expected to cover the work of foundational musicians who had come before them.

The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, happily added a host of cover songs to their albums in a bid to help boost the track numbers and help them to pump out full-length records.

Young has covered a whole host of artists, including Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and more. However, there was one artist whom he accidentally covered when composing one of his original songs, Ambulance Blues.

On that track, Young admitted to ripping off folk guitar icon Bert Jansch by copying his opening melody.

Young said of the usage of Jansch: “I always feel bad I stole that melody from Bert Jansch. F**k. You ever heard that song The Needle of Death? I loved that melody. I didn’t realise Ambulance Blues starts exactly the same. I knew that it sounded like something that he did, but when I went back and heard that record again, I realised that I copped his thing… I felt really bad about that.”

“And years later, on On the Beach, I wrote the melody of Ambulance Blues by styling the guitar part completely on Needle of Death. I wasn’t even aware of it, and someone else drew my attention to it,” Neil Young additionally concluded.