Neil Young

The sound of Neil Young is instantly recognizable: that piercing voice that cuts like a knife, capable of shifting from a whisper to a shout within the same verse, and that guitar that seems to breathe. He’s not a guitarist chasing cold virtuosity, but one who feels every note like a heartbeat. With Crazy Horse, he sounds like an out-of-control train barreling down riffs that dig into the bone, while on his acoustic records — like Harvest — the melody intertwines with the landscape, as if folk and country had met in a clearing in the woods. His harmonica carries the same weight as his lyrics, which often serve as mirrors to his own cracks: from heartbreak to rage against injustice, passing through landscapes only he knows how to describe. It doesn’t matter if he’s alone with a guitar or surrounded by distortion: it always sounds like raw truth.

In 1969, after disbanding Buffalo Springfield — the band that took him from Winnipeg to Los Angeles — he recorded Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere in three days with borrowed equipment. The album was born from a back pain that left him bedridden, yet it ended up being one of his most vital works: there are "Down by the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand," songs that seem to last forever because they have no hurry to end. That same year, he joined Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, where his voice blended with theirs like a fourth element, yet without losing his identity. With them, he recorded Déjà Vu, an album that reached number one and, decades later, remains the soundtrack for those who believe rock can be both intimate and epic.