The Passing Comment That Inspired This Iconic Neil Young Album (And Summarized His Entire Artistic Ethos)

Knowing your artistic ethos deep down is one thing. Putting it into words is another. And for Neil Young, he never heard his creative credence put in such plain English as when he was working on the live album that would become Rust Never Sleeps.

The three-word phrase originated in an advertisement for a rust-proofing product called Rust-Oleum, which was then picked up by the members of Devo. The new wave band behind tracks like “Whip It” lifted the phrase themselves, calling it the “corruption of innocence” and “de-evolution of the planet.”

Mark Mothersbaugh included it in a lyric while collaborating with Neil Young in the late 1970s, which put the phrase on the Canadian singer-songwriter’s radar.

“I thought, ‘Wow, right off they wrote better lyrics than I did,’” Young said. “I can relate to ‘rust never sleeps.’ It relates to my career. The longer I keep going, the longer I have to fight this corrosion.”

Neil Young Said It Was Better to Burn out Than to Rust

Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo inadvertently gifted Neil Young the album title Rust Never Sleeps while they were jamming on “My, My, Hey, Hey”. This song famously includes the line, “It’s better to burn out than to rust.” In 1988, Young elaborated on this idea in an interview with Spin magazine.

“Rust implies you’re not using anything, that you’re sitting there and letting the elements eat you. Burning up means you’re cruising through the elements so f***ing fast that you’re actually burning, and your circuits, instead of corroding, are f***ing disintegrating. You’re going so fast you’re actually f***ing the elements, becoming one with the elements, turning to gas. That’s why it’s better to burn out.”

While this phrase helped summarize Young’s prolific, tireless, and private work ethic, there were some regrets that revealed themselves to him in hindsight. When Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain included this sentiment in his suicide note, it was incredibly distressing for Young. “I, coincidentally, had been trying to reach him through our offices to tell him that I thought he was great,” Young recalled in his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace. “When he died and left that note, it struck a deep chord inside of me. It f***ed with me.”

Young wanted to cut the song from all future live performances after Cobain’s death. But after Cobain’s surviving bandmates asked him not to, he changed his mind. With the knowledge that Cobain’s method of carrying out this ethos wasn’t the correct way and begets more tragedy than Young ever intended, there is truth in Young’s interpretation of “rust never sleeps.” To be endlessly creating is to be endlessly moving, and the real “burning out” is hopping from one artistic endeavor to the next.

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