![]() ![]() "I loved 'The Loner,' from Neil’s first solo album in. "No doubt, when I recorded my vocal, I was infused with Neil Young and his music," Bunnell told The Wall Street Journal in 2018. Young was reportedly none too pleased with the similarities between both artists' hits, but Bunnell has insisted that any comparisons were purely complimentary. "A Horse With No Name" displaced Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" atop the Hot 100 - a fitting usurpation, as many people, including Young's own father, wrongfully attributed "A Horse With No Name" to the singer. "The rain was starting to get to us, and I wanted to capture the desert and the heat and the dryness." "I wanted to capture the imagery of the desert, because I was sitting in this room in England, and it was rainy," he said in the liner notes to the Highway: 30 Years of America box set. Rather than a thinly veiled reference to hard drugs, Bunnell said "A Horse With No Name" reflected his desire for a change of scenery at the time of its writing. Living in England, I don't ever recall that term. "It's true the song got banned from radio at one time because people said it was about heroin, which sometimes was called 'horse,'" Bunnell told American Songwriter. "That was news to me. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1972, despite getting banned by some radio stations for its supposed drug references. 12, 1972, and included the track on the 1972 reissue and all subsequent reissues of their debut album. Listen to America's 'A Horse With No Name'Īmerica released "A Horse With No Name" as a single on Jan. "And I said, 'Sure, that's fine.' I didn't blink." "As we were honing this song down, Ian said immediately, 'Well, dude, you must call this 'Horse With No Name,'" Bunnell recalled. The band cut a proper version of "Desert Song" with Ian Samwell, who also produced America. But "when Warner heard it, they said, 'Hey, we really like that. ![]() When I first brought it to Gerry and Dan, and we were playing it, I really thought it was almost a novelty song," he told American Songwriter. "It was just thrown into a pile of other songs. The band went back to the studio to demo four more songs, including a sprightly, mystifying folk-rock number from Bunnell called "Desert Song." In it, Bunnell sings of a man trudging through the desert on "a horse with no name," taking in the sparse wildlife and turning red under the sweltering sun.īunnell didn't think much of "Desert Song" at first. ![]() asked it to write another song that would fare better on the radio. The group had been planning to release the tender ballad "I Need You" as a lead single, but Warner Bros. America was moderately successful upon release, but it lacked a hit single. ![]()
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