Canadian-American songwriter, vocalist and guitarist, first recognized with the group “Buffalo Springfield.” His credits also include working with “Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young” and “Pearl Jam.” He writes lyrically beautiful love songs set to hard-edged rock music. He has recorded more than 500 songs. In 1997 he was recording with his band, “Crazy Horse.”
Young has a 13-year-old daughter and two sons, 19 and 25, (1997) who both have cerebral palsy, a cruelly disabling disorder. He shares his enthusiasm for model trains with his boys, having devised a remote control devise that allows them to operate the sets. He is aware of physical handicaps from personal experience as he had polio and epileptic seizures in his youth. Young became part-owner of Lionel Trains Inc and now markets his remote devices where handicapped kids can play with trains like any other kid.
He and his wife, Pegi, helped organize the Bridge, a school near San Francisco for severely handicapped kids. Young has hosted a Bridge benefit concert for 11 years.
Health, or the pursuit of it, has dogged Young all his life. He was afflicted with polio at the age of five. In the early Seventies, two of his best friends, Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry, overdosed on heroin – and Young released the stark and confrontational Tonight’s The Night in response. In the ’80s Pegi was given a fifty-fifty chance of surviving cancer. Young himself is epileptic and suffers from a spinal deformity.
Uncomfortable with interviews Young even finds socializing an agonizing process.
Carrie Snodgress, the softly-spoken actress who dated Young from 1969 to 1975 and lived with him at Broken Arrow, says: ‘I remember most nights I would go out and invite down the folks from the local mountain to supper’. One night, Young came back from a walk. The house guests immediately stood up to attention. ‘And I’ll never forget what Neil did,’ says Snodgress. ‘He just walked right past them all in the living room and jumped out of the window. I mean, he did it to be funny. But on another level it horrified him to be thought of as a presidential figure.’ His friends describe him as ‘intense’, ‘shy’ and ‘incredibly honest’. Two of them, one a former lover, laughed when asked to sum up his independent streak: ‘Neil is a typical triple Scorpio,’ they both said.
On 29 March 2005, in a New York City hospital, the musician underwent treatment for a brain aneurysm that was discovered earlier in the month after he experienced vision problems.
Young and Daryl Hannah were reported to have wed on 25 August 2018 in Atascadero, California.
Link to Wikipedia biography