Here’s a connection to the “Candy Mountain” motif found in Chris’s earlier post. In this song from 1968 (although apparently written in 1964 when the writer was 19), Canadian singer/songwriter Neil Young uses the earthly paradise imagery of “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” to create a song about the loss of childhood. We all yearn for the better days of childhood at one time or another and this same impulse could underly the search for Utopia on a broader scale. Utopia is a way of responding to a complicated and threatening present that does not answer to our best hopes. In the song, the simplicity of childhood–the sensuous immediacy, the lack of judgment, and the uncomplicated joy of going to the fair–is gone and what lies ahead is troubling, dark, and unknown, but the speaker hasn’t gotten there yet as he pauses between lost joy and future hardship. It’s sad and beautiful and shows how the utopian motifs can be used within lyric forms.
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Sugar Mountain
And So It Was Written
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