Four Strong Winds - 2016 Remaster

"Four Strong Winds" is a song written by Canadian singer Ian Tyson. This is his most famous song, and perhaps Neil Young's performance of it is the most famous version. However, don't neglect the fact that Tyson has had a well-rounded career in his own right, scoring many charting hits on the Canadian country charts from 1979 through 1996.

This song, being a mostly melancholy meditation on love lost with a fleeting hope for reunion but a pessimistic expectation, is an uncharacteristic downer for Neil Young at this stage. The album Comes A Time was a return to Young's Harvest style of folk/country rock.
Ironically, Young had just split with Nicolette Larson when he began touring the album, but he was to meet Pegi Morton while she was waitressing at a diner near his ranch. They got married and at last Young had the woman he would settle down with. Some of the story of how they met is covered in "T-Bone."

Young was at the height of his eccentricity (well, one of them, anyway) around the time of this album's release; he discovered a flaw in the album after it was released and paid out of his own pocket to have the 200,000 LPs recalled. His father, Scott Young, reminisces in his memoir Neil and Me about the recalled LPs stacked in a storage building: "Each case of albums had been fired at with a rifle, piercing each record and making it unusable."

In a March 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, Young revealed that he used the huge pile of Comes a Time albums as shingles for a barn roof.