| My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) | |
| Cover: | Neil Young - My My single cover.jpg |
| Type: | single |
| Artist: | Neil Young and Crazy Horse |
| Album: | Rust Never Sleeps |
| A-Side: | Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) |
| Released: | August 27, 1979 |
| Recorded: | May 26, 1978 |
| Venue: | Boarding House, San Francisco, California |
| Genre: | Acoustic rock[1] |
| Length: | 3:45 |
| Label: | Reprise |
| Producer: |
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| Prev Title: | Four Strong Winds |
| Prev Year: | 1978 |
| Next Title: | The Loner (Live) |
| Next Year: | 1980 |
"My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" is a song by Canadian musician Neil Young. An acoustic song, it was recorded live in early 1978 at the Boarding House in San Francisco, California. Combined with its hard rock counterpart "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)", it bookends Young's 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps.[2] Inspired by electropunk group Devo, the rise of punk and what Young viewed as his own growing irrelevance, the song significantly revitalized Young's career.[3]
The line, "it's better to burn out than to fade away" was taken from one of the songs of Young's bandmate in the short-lived supergroup The Ducks, Jeff Blackburn.[4] It became infamous after being quoted in Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain's suicide note. Young later said that he was so shaken that he dedicated his 1994 album Sleeps with Angels to Cobain.
Young compared the rise of Johnny Rotten with that of the recently deceased "King" Elvis Presley, who himself had once been disparaged as a dangerous influence only to later become an icon. In 1977, Rotten responded by playing a song by Young on a radio program.[5]
The song may best be known for the line "It's better to burn out than to fade away". The line occurs during the introduction to Def Leppard's 1983 song "Rock of Ages". It was also used in the movie Highlander (1986), when the Kurgan (Clancy Brown) exits a church after meeting the Highlander (Christopher Lambert). Kurt Cobain's suicide note ended with the same line,[6] shaking Young and inadvertently cementing his place as the so-called "Godfather of Grunge".[7] [8]
Ex-Beatle John Lennon commented on the message of the song in a 1980 interview with David Sheff of Playboy:[9]
Young, when asked to respond to Lennon's comments two years later, replied:
Oasis covered the song during their 2000 world tour, including it on their live album and DVD Familiar to Millions. The band acknowledged Cobain's attachment to the song by dedicating it to him when they played it in Seattle on the sixth anniversary of his death.[10]
It is included on Neil Young's Greatest Hits album.
The song is the title theme of Dennis Hopper's movie Out of the Blue.[11]
The song was included at number 93 in Bob Mersereau's book The Top 100 Canadian Singles (2010).
A cover by Battleme appeared on season 3, episode 13 of Sons of Anarchy.