Natural Beauty is about survival in nature in general and survival of any situation, there's many things in it. The subject of this song is meandering, it's kind of a trip through space. It's like I took a completed album of all kinds of different songs and threw it up in the air and it came crashing down. I took all the pieces and put them back together again. It's a live tape I overdubbed on, added all kinds of acoustic instruments to. Doing Natural Beauty live in Portland and singing it all the way through, I nailed it right there. There was no sense in trying to do a better one. I know I got it when I was doing things with the structure I'd never been able to do again. Neil Young New Music Express November 7, 1992

GW: Do all the songs on Harvest Moon come from a particular period of time? YOUNG: There's two groups of songs on the record: those that I started a long time ago and were finished in 1991 or '92, and those that were written entirely in other years. For example, "One Of These Days" was written in '85, "Natural Beauty" and "Dreamin' Man" in '89, "Unknown Legend" was '82 and '92. All different periods. I also composed a couple of songs last summer while on vacation with my wife and kids in Evergreen, Colorado. I wrote "War Of Man" and I finished "You And Me," which I started in 1975^*. There were 17 or 18 possibilities for Harvest Moon. The songs that didn't make the cut are just waiting for something else, I guess. Neil Young Guitar World/Gary Graff June 1993 * - The intro to "I Am A Child" at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Feb 1, 1971 contained a fragment of "You And Me"