Neil Percival Young, who was born on November 12, 1945, is a singer-songwriter and musician from both Canada and the United States. He is the son of Scott Young, a journalist and author, and started his career in music in Winnipeg during the 1960s before moving to Los Angeles in 1966 to establish the rock group Buffalo Springfield. In 1969 he began his solo career with his backing group Crazy Horse.
Among his solo albums are several that have received critical acclaim, including Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969), After the Gold Rush (1970), Harvest (1972), On the Beach (1974) and Rust Never Sleeps (1979). He was also a part-time member of the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, for whom he recorded the number-one 1970 album Déjà Vu. The personal nature of his lyrics and his characteristic high tenor vocal style have defined his long-standing career.
Moreover, he plays the piano and harmonica on a number of albums, the music of which frequently blends folk, rock, country and other genres. Because of his frequently distorted electric guitar playing, particularly with Crazy Horse, he earned the nickname “Godfather of Grunge” and as a result released his 1995 album Mirror Ball with Pearl Jam. More recently, however, he has had Promise of the Real as his backing group.
Profile Summary CategoryInformation Full NameNeil Percival Young BornNovember 12, 1945 (age 80) BirthplaceToronto, Ontario, Canada Other NamesBernard Shakey; Joe Yankee CitizenshipCanada; United States (from 2020) OccupationsSinger-songwriter; Musician; Film Director; Screenwriter Years Active1963–Present WorksFull list SpousesSusan Acevedo (married 1968; divorced 1970); Pegi Morton (married 1978; divorced 2014); Daryl Hannah (married 2018) PartnerCarrie Snodgress (1970–1975) Children3 FatherScott Young SiblingAstrid Young (sister) Musical OriginWinnipeg, Manitoba, Canada GenresRock; Folk rock; Country rock; Proto-grunge InstrumentsVocals; Guitar; Harmonica; Keyboards LabelsWarner Bros.; Reprise; Atco; Atlantic; Geffen Member OfCrazy Horse; Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts Formerly OfThe Squires; The Mynah Birds; Buffalo Springfield; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; The Stills-Young Band Websiteneilyoungarchives.com Age Neil Percival Young was born on November 12, 1945 (making him 80 years old) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Biography Neil Percival Young was born on November 12, 1945, in Toronto, Ontario; his mother, Edna Blow Ragland “Rassy” Young (1918–1990), belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution, and his father, Scott Alexander Young (1918–2005), was a journalist and writer. Even though he was Canadian, Young’s mother had both American and French descent. The parents got married in 1940 in Winnipeg, Manitoba and then moved to Toronto.
It was in Toronto that their first son, Robert “Bob” Young, was born in 1942. When Young was born, the family relocated to Omemee, a rural area in Ontario, which he later remembered in a favourable light as a “sleepy little place”. He caught polio in the late summer of 1951, at the time of the last major outbreak of the disease in Ontario, and consequently became partially paralysed on his left side.
After being discharged from the hospital, the Young family spent the winter in Florida since they thought the mild climate there would aid Neil’s recovery. At that time, Young briefly went to Faulkner Elementary School in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. In 1952, when he returned to Canada, Young moved from Omemee to Pickering (in 1956) and then lived in Winnipeg for a year (a place where he would later go again) before moving to Toronto (from 1957 to 1960).
While in Toronto, he was a first-year student at Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute in 1959. It is said that he was expelled for riding a motorcycle down the corridor of the school. He also became interested in the popular music that he heard on the radio. More… When he was twelve his father, who had had a number of affairs outside of his marriage, left his mother and she then asked for a divorce which was granted in 1960; she moved back to Winnipeg with Neil joining her there, while his brother Bob remained with their father in Toronto.
In the mid-1950s Young listened to rock ‘n roll, rockabilly, doo-wop, R&B, country and western pop. He looked up to Elvis Presley and later mentioned him in several of his songs. Other early musical influences were Link Wray, Lonnie Mack, Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs, The Ventures, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Chuck Berry, Hank Marvin, Little Richard, Fats Domino, The Chantels, The Monotones, Ronnie Self, the Fleetwoods, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Gogi Grant.
Young had previously played music on a plastic ukulele, as he would later explain, before moving on to “a better ukulele, then to a banjo ukulele and afterwards to a baritone ukulele – everything except a guitar.” Personal life Both of Young’s parents were born and married in Manitoba, and so was his family. He was born in Toronto, in the province of Ontario, and spent various periods of his early life there (1945, 1957, 1959–1960, 1966–1967), as well as living in Omemee (1945–1952) and in Pickering, Ontario (1956), before moving with his mother to Winnipeg, Manitoba (1958, 1960–1966), where his music career got under way and which he regards as his ‘hometown’.
After he had become successful he purchased properties in California. He had resided outside Canada since 1967 before going back to Canada in 2020. Young had the Broken Arrow Ranch, a property of approximately 1,000 acres (400 ha) situated near La Honda, California, that he bought in 1970 for $350,000 (£2.9 million when adjusted for 2025 dollars); the area was later expanded to cover thousands of acres.
After their divorce in 2014, he moved out and handed the ranch over to Pegi Young. His son, Ben, now lives there. Citizenship In 2019 Young stated that his application for United States citizenship had been delayed due to his use of marijuana; the matter was settled in 2020 and he then became a United States citizen. Just as soon as he had obtained his US citizenship Young went back to living in Canada for the first time in more than fifty years, together with Daryl Hannah moving to a cottage near Omemee, the town where he had lived from the time of his birth until the age of seven.
Marriages and relationships Young got married to his first wife, Susan Acevedo, the restaurant owner, in December 1968 and remained with her until October 1970 when she applied for divorce. From 1970 until 1975 Young was in a relationship with the actress Carrie Snodgress; the song ‘A Man Needs a Maid’ on the album Harvest was inspired by the time he saw her in the film Diary of a Mad Housewife.
They met shortly after that and she then moved into his house on his ranch in northern California; they have a son named Zeke who was born on September 8, 1972 and has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Young met his next wife, Pegi Young (whose family name was Morton), in 1974, while she was working as a waitress at The Mountain House close to his ranch, a point which he makes in his 1992 song ‘Unknown Legend’.
They got married in August 1978 and had two children, Ben and Amber. Ben has been given a diagnosis of cerebral palsy and Amber suffers from epilepsy. The two were musical collaborators and co-founders of the Bridge School in 1986. They divorced in 2014 after being married for 36 years. Pegi died on 1 January 2019. In 2014 Young started a relationship with the actress Daryl Hannah; they got married on August 25, 2018, in Atascadero, California.
Business ventures Young was a co-owner of Lionel, LLC, the company which produces toy trains and model railroad accessories. When Lionel came out of bankruptcy in 2008, his shares in the company were cancelled. He played a key role in designing the Lionel Legacy control system for model trains and is still a member of Lionel’s board of directors. He has been credited as a co-inventor on seven US patents concerning model trains.
PonoMusic Young has for a long time believed that the digital audio formats used by most people when downloading music have serious defects and do not reproduce the rich, warm sound of analog recordings; he says that he is very aware of this difference and illustrates it by comparing it to taking a shower in tiny ice cubes rather than in ordinary water. Together with his company PonoMusic, Young developed Pono, a music download service and a dedicated music player aimed at offering ‘high-quality’ uncompressed digital audio.
The purpose of Pono was to compete with the highly compressed MP3 type formats. It promised to play back songs ‘as they first sound during studio recording’. The service and the sale of the player were introduced in October 2014 and then discontinued in April 2017. Career & Musical Journey Main bands and positions: he was a singer-songwriter, musician, and filmmaker (known as Bernard Shakey); he became famous as a member of Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY), and also of his regular backing group, Crazy Horse.
He is known for albums such as After the Gold Rush (1970) and Harvest (1972), together with the number-one single “Heart of Gold”, and is frequently referred to as the “Godfather of Grunge”. They have been induced twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one time as a solo artist in 1995 and another time as a member of Buffalo Springfield in 1997. In 2021 he increased his long-term wealth by selling a 50 percent share of his large music catalog to the Hipgnosis Songs Fund for about $150 million.
Started the Farm Aid campaign in 1985 and was also responsible for setting up the Bridge School Benefit for children who have speech and physical impairments. Legacy Because of his political outspokenness and social awareness, Young had an impact on artists including Blind Melon, Phish, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana. He is known as the “godfather of grunge” due to his influence on both Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder and on the grunge movement.
Vedder honoured Young by inducting him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. Johnny Marr has named Young one of the main influences on his characteristic jangly guitar playing. Thom Yorke of Radiohead stated that the album After the Gold Rush gave him the confidence to show “softness and naiveté” in his vocals. He also acknowledged Young as an influence on his lyrics. He said: “It was his attitude towards the way he laid down his songs.
It’s always about recording whatever is in your head at the time and sticking completely to that, no matter what it is.” The Australian rock group Powderfinger took their name from Neil Young’s song “Powderfinger”, which appeared on the album Rust Never Sleeps in 1979. Members of the band The Constantines sometimes gave tribute performances to Neil Young under the name Horsey Craze.
Other bands and artists who have admitted to being influenced by Neil Young are the Smoke Fairies, who covered his song “Alabama” on the album Harvest Revisited, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. Meat Puppets, Teenage Fanclub, Nada Surf frontman Matthew Caws, and Feeder singer Grant Nicholas. Jason Bond, a biologist at East Carolina University, found a new species of trapdoor spider in 2007 and named it Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi in honour of Young, his favourite singer. Net Worth As of 2026, Neil Young’s net worth is estimated to be $200 million.
