Songfacts®:

• One of Neil Young's rarities, "Winterlong" finds him yearning and waiting, possibly for a woman, but that's no sure thing. All we know is, he's looking to find his way, and not sure how to get there. The song contains one of the more evocative lines in Young's catalog: "It's all illusion anyway."
• Fans recall hearing Young perform this song as early as 1970. It's likely he recorded it in 1974 during the session for his album On The Beach, but "Winterlong" wasn't released until 1977, which it appeared on the Decade collection.
• The Pixies recorded this for the 1989 compilation The Bridge - A Tribute To Neil Young. According to Pixies frontman Black Francis, it's one of his favorite songs, and one he spent a lot of time analyzing. "I really, really like the song," Francis told Songfacts. "I thought about it a lot. There's some kind of commitment to trying to find the ultimate performance of it. I certainly love the arrangement of the song. There's not really a chorus in the song, but it sounds like a really chorus-y song. It has very classic/traditional kind of chord shapes in it, like '50s rock, but it has a much more nuanced arrangement than you would think, kind of like a Roy Orbison song or something like that."