Sometimes you have to wonder about how songs were created, how they took the shape they did. How they came to sound the way we’ve accepted that they do after listening to them for years. What went into the choices, the decisions to veer in a certain, perhaps unexpected direction, when another, or really, infinite other, choices were also available?

To wit, I bring you the title track of Neil Young’s 1970 classic album After the Gold Rush. Lyrically, it’s been much scrutinized, its meaning disputed and perhaps mischaracterized. It’s been suggested that ‘After the Gold Rush’ was inspired by a dream and considers a future when mankind uses space travel to perpetuate the species in the wake of environmental destruction. Yet Neil himself has demurred. “I have no idea,” he once opined. “I think it’s about the Second Coming or the invasion of aliens, or both.” Let’s just chalk up Neil’s thought process to his famed line in the middle of verse two: “And I felt like getting high.”

But musically, it couldn’t be much more simple. There are just two elements: Young’s vocals and a piano. That’s it. At least through the end of that second verse, nearly two minutes in, when convention holds that there likely would be a solo break. One can imagine the producer hitting the talkback button in the control room, his disembodied voice coming in to Young’s Topanga Canyon home studio to inquire, “What are you thinking here, Neil?” Then, after a suitable pause, “Ahh, I know,” Young responded in my imagined recreation, “I believe this moment calls for a French horn.”

And so it did. A French horn takes it away, and continues on, mirroring the melody, almost solemnly, for close to a full minute on the recording. It’s…well, what is it? It’s an interesting ornament to the tune, I guess. But it’s still got to rank pretty high as one of the more peculiar choices made in the assembly of a rock song. Imagine for a moment that stoned Neil had instead requested a harmonica or guitar interlude, as would have been more typical. Or, I don’t know, a kazoo? How might the song have been differently received in 1970, or retained in the 55 (yes, 55!) years since? I can’t be the only one who stays up nights thinking about these things, can I?

While not discounting the oddity of Young’s choice, it must also be noted that it is not the French horn’s only rock and roll appearance (I’m referring here to inclusion as a solo piece, not as part of an arrangement or in an intro, like, most famously, for ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’). You’ll also hear it featured in The Beatles’ ‘For No One,’ a part that somehow feels entirely appropriate, as well as in ‘Pictures of Lily’ by The Who, a squonking passage apparently played by bassist John Entwistle, that sounds as much like a bull moose mating call as a musical instrument. That one stands apart as popular music’s single weirdest emergence of this twisted coil of brass tubes, valves and levers. What if Young’s French horn choice in ‘Gold Rush’ had instead employed that ungodly racket? We’ll never know. But, to borrow a phrase, I bet it would have had Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies.