This is where we encounter what is often called Neil’s “ditch trilogy”. The term comes from the liner notes to Decade, where Neil admits that Harvest had gotten him to the middle-of-the-road, so he deliberately drove his career into a ditch because it was more interesting. Honestly I’m not sure how much of a choice it was on Neil’s part. Despite the success of the previous few years, Neil’s life was a mess. Dealing with divorce, drugs, and death, Neil was either going to have to follow his muse into these darker paths, or he was going to have to get into some rather serious denial.

While these albums did not sell nearly as well, a lot of Neil’s critical respect comes from the work he produced at this time. The record-buying public were not the only ones who didn’t care for Neil’s more morose music, he himself has often resisted canonizing these works, and these albums were often out-of-print or simply unavailable (legally) on CD.

Following the success of Harvest Neil toured playing mostly new songs with a very different sound from that record. These tunes were recorded and released as Time Fades Away. The tour was a spectacle of a trainwreck. Everybody was clearly stoned, but the drug-overdose deaths of the drummer and a roadie, didn’t inspire Neil to clean up his act. Instead it inspired a dark and disturbing album of sloppily performed, heart-felt songs on the subject titled Tonight’s The Night. Neil decided not to release the album at the time — something he would do a lot.

The final album recorded (but only the second released) from the “ditch trilogy” was On The Beach – another critical success and commercial failure that Neil would later attempt to disavow. Still it sounded like Neil was finally coming out of his dark days into something brighter. But there was still that unreleased album haunting him. Not know which album to release would soon become something of a habit for Neil.