[RS] When Nicolette Larson was growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, she’d ask her friends to drive over bumpy roads so she could show off her Neil Young impression. As the truck moved up and down, she’d break out into a shaky vibrato.Just a few years later, the singer found herself in a pickup again, this time with the very man she once emulated. Young — who first worked with Larson on his 1977 LP American Stars ’n Bars, and briefly dated her afterward — was driving her around his Northern California ranch when she spotted a cassette tape on the floor containing songs that would wind up on his 1978 album Comes a Time.
"I picked it up, blew the dust off it, I stuck it in the cassette player, and ’Lotta Love’ came on," she told Jimmy McDonough in the Young biography Shakey. "I said, ’Neil, that’s a really good song.’ He said, ’You want it? It’s yours.’"
Larson recorded "Lotta Love" for her 1978 debut, Nicolette, which coincidentally landed on shelves the same day as Comes a Time. Produced by Ted Templeman, who also helmed records by Van Halen and the Doobie Brothers that same year, the song immediately transformed her from an obscure backup singer to a hit solo artist, peaking at Number Eight on the Billboard Hot 100. Rolling Stone called her the Female Singer of the Year, writing, "No one else could sound like she’s having so much fun for a whole album."
"Lotta Love" link.