This Note's for You

This Note's for You is the 18th studio album by Canadian-American musician Neil Young, released April 11, 1988, on Reprise. The album marked Young's return to the recently reactivated Reprise Records after a rocky tenure with Geffen Records.

It was originally credited to "Young and the Bluenotes". Part of the album's concept centered on the commercialism of rock and roll, and tours in particular (the title track, specifically, is a hostile social commentary on concert sponsorship). The music is marked by the use of a horn section.

In 2015, Young released a live album from the album's accompanying tour, which he titled Bluenote Café.

During the 1987 tour with Crazy Horse, Young began playing a short "blues" set between the standard acoustic and electric sets, featuring Crazy Horse (with Poncho Sampedro playing organ instead of guitar), Ben Keith, and Young's guitar tech Larry Cragg on saxophones. The song "This Note's for You" was debuted at those shows. Young liked the results ("...[crowd] were going fucking nuts and no one was shouting for "Southern Man" like they've done throughout my whole fucking career"), and following the tour conclusion he further expanded the horn section, dubbing the new band The Bluenotes.

Young wrote most of the songs on an old Gibson guitar owned by his wife Pegi since she was a child. He recalls writing "Ten Men Working" in a contemporary interview:

"I had this groove going through my head and I was playing it on my guitar, which is actually my wife's guitar, which she's had since she was just a little teenybopper, I guess. She took it everywhere with her. And it really feels like her, so I wrote every song on this album, except one, on that guitar. It's an old Gibson, like a J-45 or something. It just feels so good. I'd be walking around the house playing. And I had this groove going, didn't have any lyrics, but I don't try and make up words. I figure something'll happen and I'll start singin' the words. Until then, I don't have any words. I never just try and think of something clever. So the way "Ten Men Workin'" came to me was...one morning I was gettin' ready to go into where we recorded the Bluenotes record, on Melrose Avenue across from the Hollywood Cemetery. One of the guys, the engineer of my boat, had a Men At Work T-shirt on. I just kept lookin' at that T-shirt and started thinkin', 'Yeah, that's me. I'm workin' and we're workin'.' It's like we were building something. We had this job to do. It's like it was our mission to make people feel good and to make 'em dance.

Young remembers writing "This's Note's For You" while on tour: "I remember writing it in my bus, turning to my driver and saying, 'Jesus Christ, this must be the most idiotic fucking song I've ever written.' I still can't believe that such a dumb little song could have helped resuscitate my career the way it did."

"Sunny Inside" dates from 1982, the only song that wasn't written during the album's production.