Neil Young by Nathan Gelgud, 2014.

When's the last time you listened to Neil Young's After the Gold Rush? If you're not sure, it's been too long. Time to queue it up again. Gold Rush is Young's third solo album, released in 1970. Its third track is "Only Love Can Break Your Heart." You can play that song many times in a row, and it won't bother me, even if you're blasting it in a thin-walled apartment and I'm your neighbor. And I'm trying to sleep. And it's three a.m. And I have to be up early.

Around the time After the Gold Rush came out, Young was "starting to be known as a guy who loved old cars," he writes in his new memoir, Special Deluxe. "I was buying cars left and right. Half of them didn't run very well, but they were all unique looking and defined a style." As we saw in his previous memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, Young has a thing for automobiles. Once again, Young writes in a conversational manner, cruising around his life story. In this case, he often returns to what cars he was buying and driving and when and why.

The year after Gold Rush came out, he bought a crappy, smoke-breathing Packard Clipper just because it had a cool hood ornament. Purchases like this made Young start to wonder about his habit and his values. "Was there some inadequacy I was trying to cover up?" Always more interested in an anecdote than indulgent self-analysis, he begs off the subject: "This is a book about cars, so I won't go into that."

Each chapter begins with a lovely, loose color illustration of a car or truck done by Young himself. In rough chronological order, he writes about his time with the Squires, Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse, or the Ducks, who were "not a normal band." The Ducks rolled around in a 1948 Packard Woodie Station Wagon they called the Duckmobile. In a funny paragraph, Young links the theft of the Duckmobile's hood ornament to the demise of the Ducks, as well as the descent of Santa Cruz into a city that would go on to suffer from "transients, homelessness, street crime, and some well-known unsafe areas where the Pussinger Curse still remains particularly strong to this day." (A surfer named Pussinger was held largely to blame.)

You can read Special Deluxe straight through or jump around for quick stories from Young. Or, like listening to your favorite Young song (and it really should be "Only Love Can Break Your Heart") on repeat, you can dog-ear a particularly good passage, like the one about the Ducks, and read it as often as possible.

Nathan Gelgud illustration inspired by Neil Young's memoir Special Deluxe, 2014.