Neil Young’s song meant a great deal to me when I was a kid, listening to FM AOR and trying to escape into the magical, and seemingly “adult,” world contained in the songs. “Hey Hey, My My”‘s plaintive beauty, transformed into a gorgeous molten mess on the Live Rust album, seemed to tell me something about my own life, or at least my future. I always felt headed dangerously out of the blue and into the black. I now realize that one of the lines in my new book of poetry, All of You on the Good Earth

, probably derived from some deep memory of those lines from Young’s dirge. My poem “City-Scape Gentlemen’s Club, Queens” ends with the couplet “He should go. The others fade off. They’re through. / A downy black reaches through light to blue.” I’m pleased that The Chromatics have done such a caring and persuasive cover of the classic song. Give it a listen, and share!