Neil Young plays ‘Pardon my heart’: the video with dog and fireplace

After the video in which he sings “Silver and gold” for the first time in almost 20 years as a holiday greeting, Neil Young shared another clip as the second episode of his “fireside sessions” in which he dusts off a song he didn’t play for a long time.

“Hello again everyone. Still pretty chill here. This is our second fireside session of the season. Love and peace to you all,” reads the description of the new video. This time the video shows the Canadian singer-songwriter, in front of the lit fireplace of his home and in the company of his dog lying in the foreground, playing “Pardon my heart” for the first time in 50 years. The clip is available on Young’s website at this address.

“Pardon my heart” is a song from Neil Young’s 1975 album, “Zuma”, and has only been played live twice before. As reported by NME, the song debuted live during a surprise late-night set in New York in May 1974. “This is a love song. It’s one of the saddest love songs I’ve ever heard,” the singer-songwriter said, according to what was reported at the time in the US edition of “Rolling Stone”. In August of that same year, Young played again “Pardon my heart” during the reunion tour stop with Crosby, Stills and Nash at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale in New York.

Prior to these two performances, the song had been recorded in June 1974 and featured Tim Drummond on bass and the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot on backing vocals. Once completed, “Pardon my heart” remained in the archive for over a year.

In an interview with “Rolling Stone US” in 1974, Young said of the song: “(Joni Mitchell) writes about her relationships much more vividly than I do. (…) I guess I tried to put in more depth on what I’m talking about. I wrote some songs as raw as his, like ‘Pardon my heart’, ‘Home fires’, ‘Love art blues’, and almost all of ‘Homegrown’. I never released them probably not I never will. I think I’d be too embarrassed to post them. They’re a little too real.” Ultimately, the singer-songwriter released “Pardon my heart” a few months later on the “Zuma” album, but “Homegrown” didn’t see the light of day until 2020, some 45 years after its completion.