Songfacts®:

• In speaking about Harvest Moon, Young stated that the album's theme was, "How do we keep going? How can you keep an old relationship new? How do you make love last? How can you bring the past with you?"
  
  That broader theme fits cleanly and unambiguously with "You And Me." In fact, there may be no one song on the album that better encapsulates it.
  
  The song opens with Young singing:
  
  Open up your eyes
  See how life time flies
  Open up and let the light back in
  
  From there, the whole song is a call to both remember and renew, to cherish the past while remaining hopeful for the future.
  
  The repeated call to "open up and let the light back in" indicates that, at least temporarily, the light has been lost. Likewise:
  
  Old man sittin' there
  Touch of grey, but he don't care
  When he hears his children call
  
  subtly suggests that he does indeed care about that grey when the children aren't around and he's left to his silence.
  
  So, the song's not at all naïve or oversimplified, but it is optimistic.
• Young appears to have tinkered with this song for decades. During a 1971 solo performance of "I Am A Child," he sang the first three lines of "You and Me" as an intro. He abandoned the song a few years later after bassist Tim Drummond enthusiastically proclaimed that it sounded like something from Harvest.
  
  Young, never fond of retreading old ground, didn't like hearing that. The song stuck around in his head, though, and eventually saw the light of day in its final Harvest Moon form.