Soul Music - BBC Radio 4
EVERYBODY has a soundtrack to their lives. Decades are marked by music that speaks of joy and love and loss.
Soul Music took Neil Young's song, Harvest Moon and listened to the stories it evoked.
It's a love song about growing old. It's a song that whispers, "I still love you and I want to dance with you under this harvest moon."
It's about continuance. It came out in 1992 but is a nod to 1970s country rock.
We didn't have the Eagles - we didn't have dark desert highways or Tequila sunrises - said music blogger Alyson Young.
She lives near Loch Ness - and that big moon rising over the loch catches her breath just in the way this song does.
There were stories of hope and sorrow here.
It's a three chord song with so much magic.
It's a grown-up song about love and how you make the magic last, said singer-songwriter Ricky Ross.
Amanda Legere and her husband's first child was born prematurely. She should have arrived in winter but she arrived early and so they named her Autumn.
She spent 50 days in intensive care on an incubator and every morning they would drive to the hospital and her husband would put his mobile phone on top of the incubator and play her the song. She loved it as much as they did.
The song is a poignant one for Margy Waller too. She was working on low-wage workers' policy at the White House in the final days of the Clinton administration.
It was a job she loved and she knew it was coming to an end.
On that last day when they, literally, turned out the lights, she remembers climbing into her car and playing Harvest Moon and crying all the way home for the loss of so much.
But the most beautiful memories and the most beautiful version of this song belongs to jazz singer Maureen Washington.
She used to dance with her husband to it, telling him these were her memories because they wouldn't get to grow old together. He died of cancer.
This is a beautiful poignant listen - one that is as haunting as the song itself.
