Comes a Time is the ninth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young, released by Reprise Records in October 1978. Its songs are written as moralizing discourses on love's failures and recovering from worldly troubles. They are largely performed in a quiet folk and country mode, featuring backing harmonies sung by Nicolette Larson and additional accompaniment on some songs by Crazy Horse.
Production
The first sessions for the album were held at Triiad Studios in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida in September, 1977. Young recorded solo acoustic performances of several of the album's songs, often with layers of overdubs performed by himself. Overdubs were also added to the Hitchhiker recording of "Pocahontas", which later appeared on Rust Never Sleeps. "Lost in Space" on Hawks and Doves also dates from these sessions. Young compiled a solo album from the sessions, entitled Oceanside/Countryside. When Young played it for Reprise executives they asked him if he would consider adding rhythm tracks to what he already had. Young agreed and scheduled additional sessions in Nashville with a full band in November, 1977.
Much of the album features harmony vocals from Nicolette Larson, who also shares lead vocals with Young on "Motorcycle Mama". Two songs on the album, "Look Out for My Love" and "Lotta Love", featured Young's long-time backing band, Crazy Horse. "Look Out For My Love" was originally intended to close the canceled album Chrome Dreams in 1977 but saw release in its original recording here. Another song, "Human Highway", was written several years prior to the album's release and originally recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in both 1973 and 1976 for a proposed album to be called "Human Highway", but in typical CSNY fashion the recording sessions were abandoned amid acrimony between the four group members and the album never came to pass. The songs "Pocahontas" and "Sail Away" from Rust Never Sleeps were also recorded during the sessions. A personal acetate of an early version of the album, listed for sale by Young archivist Joel Bernstein, includes the songs "Dance Dance Dance" and "Country Home" in the running order for the album, in place of the Crazy Horse tracks.
Young took especial pride in the production of the album, even purchasing the first 200,000 copies of the album when a mastering defect was discovered. The artist had been unhappy with the album's sound, owing to damage that occurred to the master tape during shipment to the mixing facility. Young would explain in a November 1978 interview with Tony Schwartz for Newsweek: The version of the album most widely available today was personally remixed by Young from the safety copy of the original master. In a March 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, Young claimed that he, in fact, used the 200,000 LPs as shingles for a barn roof.
Critical reception
Reviewing for The Village Voice in October 1978, Robert Christgau hailed Comes a Time as a "tour de force" for its folkie concept and music, with melodies that rival those of Young's After the Gold Rush (1970) and a sound that is "almost always quiet, usually acoustic and drumless, and sweetened by Nicolette Larson". While noting that listeners may "wonder why this thirty-two-year-old hasn't learned more about Long-Term Relationships", Christgau was ultimately won over by "the spare, good-natured assurance of the singing and playing" for how it "deepens the more egregious homilies and transforms good sense into wisdom". Stereo Review magazine's Noel Coppage found the album to be Young's "simplest, most acoustic, and best produced" record since 1972's Harvest, but more "down to earth and direct" in comparison and highlighted by a healthier perspective to his usual angst and varied songs performed in a consistent style. While lamenting a lack of energy to some degree, Coppage said that repeat listens of the album will provide "rewarding experiences with texture and mood, some real tunes, and the real personality Young puts into his work". Somewhat less impressed was Greil Marcus of Rolling Stone. Describing Comes a Time as "a restrained and modest set of love songs that traces a long affair from first light to final regrets", he expressed disappointment at the relative "facelessness" of the songwriting when compared with rougher music on earlier albums like Zuma (1975) and American Stars 'n Bars (1977).
At the end of 1978, Comes a Time was voted the year's eighth best album in the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics nationwide, published in The Village Voice. Christgau, the poll's supervisor, ranked it fifth on his own year-end list accompanying the poll.