Harvest

Young injured his back after finishing After the Gold Rush, which kept him mostly to acoustic music. Playing a solo tour in early 1971 and then appearing on the Johnny Cash Show in Nashville, he met the producer Elliot Mazer, and they recorded his new songs with local players. Young named the band the Stray Gators: Ben Keith on pedal steel, Tim Drummond on bass and Kenny Buttrey on drums, joined by Jack Nitzsche. Heart of Gold was recorded on 8 February 1971 and Old Man on 6 February at Quadrafonic Sound Studios, with Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor singing backing vocals on both. A Man Needs a Maid and There's a World were recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at Barking Town Hall on 1 March, with Nitzsche arranging. The Needle and the Damage Done is a live recording from Royce Hall at UCLA on 30 January 1971. After back surgery on 11 August, Young cut the electric songs in the barn at Broken Arrow Ranch in late September: Are You Ready for the Country, Alabama and Words.

Heart of Gold reached number one on the Hot 100, the only Young record to do so in the United States, and Old Man reached 31. The album topped the Billboard 200 for two weeks. Graham Nash recalled that Young rowed him out onto the lake to hear the playback, with the house and the barn serving as the two speakers, and that Young shouted back, "More barn!" Critics were not uniformly kind at the time: John Mendelsohn of Rolling Stone called it a "disappointing retread". Young later wrote that Alabama richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave him. Rolling Stone ranked the album 78 in 2003, the Grammy Hall of Fame inducted it in 2015, and Bob Mersereau named it the greatest Canadian album of all time in his 2007 book.