Manchester Orchestra's Cover Of This Classic Love Song By Neil Young Crackles With Raw Emotion

Indie rock band Manchester Orchestra has been enthralling fans since it first emerged from Atlanta, Georgia, on a wave of rock-band hype in the mid-2000s. Over a decade later, the band was still capable of creating moments of transcendence, as demonstrated in 2021 with a lush — and perhaps better — cover version of Neil Young's "Unknown Legend," performed in session for SiriusXM.

Young's original was released as a promotional single for the critically acclaimed album "Harvest Moon" in 1992, and became a fan favorite. The song revolves around a memory the narrator has of a woman he once knew who worked in a diner, telling us he "never saw a woman look finer/ I used to order just to watch her float across the floor." Later in the song, the narrator imagines the woman racing across America on a Harley Davidson, moving from place to place like her father did, and possibly having children of her own along the way. The song was inspired by Young's early relationship with his future wife, Pegi.

The song is deceptively simple, and Young artfully establishes an instrumental that's both upbeat and melancholy, reflecting the mixed blessing that is a life spent on the open road. But for its cover version, Manchester Orchestra manages to give the song even more emotional heft.

The Manchester Orchestra version from 2021 is stripped back compared to Neil Young's original studio take. It features just two of the band's members: Andy Hull, who founded Manchester Orchestra back in the 2000s while still in high school, and Robert McDowell, who joined as a guitarist a few years later. However, for the SiriusXM session, which took place to promote Manchester Orchestra's sixth studio album "The Million Masks of God," Hull was on acoustic guitar while McDowell accompanied him on piano. 

Young's version is underpinned by a jaunty drum pattern that maintains a lightness of tone even as the melody and lyrics occasionally turn melancholic. Absent this, Manchester Orchestra's version becomes a quietly devastating ballad, with Hull's gentle, thumb-struck chords accompanied by occasional piano parts, the melody of which traces the vocals. Lines such as "You know it ain't easy; you got to hold on" are imbued with a greater sense of desperation than the original.

The cover manages to take Young's poetic original and expose its emotional core. Manchester Orchestra is adept at such transformations, and the band returned to SiriusXM in 2023, playing Cher's electro-pop classic "Believe" in an equally effective ballad form.