If you grew up dropping the needle on Harvest or Harvest Moon, Neil Young’s love life probably felt like one part of rock history that was set in stone. For decades he looked like the rare rock star who kept the ranch, the wife, the kids and the slow-dance ballads all intact.
Then the 2010s blew that image apart. A shock divorce, a Hollywood mermaid, pipeline protests, a secret yacht wedding and a feud that helped finish Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young turned Neil Young and Daryl Hannah into one of rock’s messiest late-life glow-ups. Here is what is actually known, what is speculation, and why this relationship still fascinates fans who remember when vinyl was the only format in town.
Neil & Daryl 101: Rock bard meets Hollywood mermaid
On paper, they are an odd couple. He is the craggy Canadian who wrote ‘Heart of Gold’ and ‘Like a Hurricane’; she is the ethereal screen presence from Blade Runner, Splash, Roxanne and Kill Bill who gradually shifted from studio films to activism and indie projects.
Reports generally agree that Young and Hannah’s friendship turned romantic around 2014. By August 2018, they were widely reported to have married in an ultra-private ceremony on Young’s yacht, followed by a small gathering in Atascadero, California, after roughly four years together, in what was described as a secret California wedding.
Hannah was hardly some unknown interloper. In the 1980s and 90s she had already been front-page gossip thanks to long relationships with Jackson Browne and, most famously, John F. Kennedy Jr., with whom she spent more than five turbulent years before they split in 1994.
From ‘Harvest Moon’ to divorce papers
Before Hannah, Neil’s public image was that of the unusually faithful rock husband. He married Pegi Morton in 1978 after meeting her while she waited tables near his Northern California ranch, wrote some of his most tender love songs about her, and co-founded the Bridge School with her to help children with severe disabilities, a backdrop that made their eventual split headline news when he filed for divorce after 36 years.
Quick timeline of the Neil – Pegi – Daryl triangle
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1978 | Neil marries Pegi Morton after several years together. |
| 2014 | Neil files for divorce from Pegi after 36 years of marriage. |
| 2014 | Public sightings of Neil and Daryl together spark dating rumors. |
| 2016 | Neil and Daryl appear arm-in-arm at anti-pipeline protests and benefits. |
| 2018 | Reports surface that the pair have married in secret in California. |
For fans who had danced to ‘Harvest Moon’ at their own weddings, it felt like the breakup of the one rock marriage that might actually go the distance. With the divorce papers barely dry, paparazzi shots of Neil and Daryl together gave the story a soap-opera twist.
Was Daryl the ‘other woman’?
So did Neil leave Pegi for Daryl? Entertainment pieces noted that Young was spotted publicly with Hannah very soon after news of the divorce broke and flatly reported that this timing led many to speculate an affair with the Splash star could have ended his marriage. That single word “speculate” has fueled a decade of heated forum threads.
The key point is that no outlet has produced hard proof of an overlap, and neither Young nor Hannah has ever admitted to one. What they have said, in a joint interview about their film Paradox, is that they do not give a damn what outsiders think and that even some of Neil’s old friends were negative about the match, which only made his loyalty to her more stubborn.
The ‘poisonous predator’ feud that broke the band
Nothing poured gasoline on the gossip like David Crosby. In an obituary for Pegi, Pegi Young was remembered as Neil’s long-time musical and charitable partner, but the coverage also noted that once Neil began dating Hannah, Crosby publicly labeled her a “purely poisonous predator,” a judgment he later apologized for but that enraged Young so much he has not played with Crosby since.
For fans who watched Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young embody hippie idealism, the idea of the band finally cracking over a late-life romance had a wicked irony. It recast Daryl in some circles not as Neil’s muse but as the femme fatale who helped kill CSNY.
Love, politics and arrest records: the activist power couple
Whatever you think of the timing, the couple quickly turned their romance into a political alliance. In 2016 they travelled to the Standing Rock camps protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline and published an open letter urging President Obama to ‘end the violence’ against water protectors, calling out militarized police tactics and defending Native sovereignty.
That activism was not new for Hannah, who had already been arrested multiple times fighting Keystone XL and mountaintop-removal mining, and it matched Young’s long record of protest songs. Together they looked less like a midlife fling and more like a two-person environmental pressure group with a tour bus.
Bonus drama: Trump’s alleged revenge
Hannah has even pulled their relationship into her criticisms of Donald Trump. In a 2025 interview promoting her Neil Young tour documentary, she claimed that officials under Trump “tried every trick in the book” to stall Young’s U.S. citizenship process despite his decades of residency and tax payments, framing it as political harassment of a vocal critic of the president.
Inside their off-grid life
Celebrity coverage since the wedding has painted a picture that feels more cabin-in-the-woods than Chateau Marmont. One widely shared report said the pair quietly relocated from Los Angeles to an old cottage on a remote Canadian lake, where friends claimed Hannah finally escaped “gnarly” Hollywood experiences and the two could focus on art instead of premieres.
In a lifestyle profile, Young raved that Daryl pushes him into Pilates sessions and pool workouts, that they share routines rather than red carpets, and that he feels “very lucky” to have found her, describing a daily life that sounds more like two fitness-obsessed bohemians than a scandalized power couple.
Why fans stay obsessed: myth, music and murder ballads
Part of why this romance gets more scrutiny than the average pop-star breakup is the weight of Young’s catalogue. Fans have spent decades decoding songs like “Down by the River”, which critics have read as a murder ballad about a man killing his lover by the water, long before Daryl ever entered the picture.
When a songwriter that steeped in dark, ambiguous love stories suddenly drops a 36-year marriage and walks off with a movie star, people are primed to read it as another Neil Young narrative arc. To some, Hannah is the woman who rescued a restless artist from domestic stagnation; to others, she is the real-life femme fatale he had been writing about all along.
Affairs, flings and what we actually know
Here is the unsexy truth: outside of speculation about the timing of Neil’s divorce, there is no solid public evidence that either Young or Hannah has carried on affairs during their relationship. No credible outlet has produced photos, texts or even semi-plausible blinds of either of them stepping out.
The juiciest parts of the story are not secret hotel rooms but the very public fallout: a shattered long-term marriage, a furious ex-bandmate calling Hannah a predator, the pair chaining their love life to environmental battles and fights with presidents. In an era when many scandals vanish in a week, the Neil-and-Daryl saga lingers because it hits older listeners where they live: in the uneasy space between romantic idealism and late-life reinvention.
The bottom line
So was Daryl Hannah a homewrecker, a soulmate, or simply the partner Neil Young happened to fall for when his first marriage finally cracked? The record shows a messy but very human sequence: an old relationship ending, a new one beginning, friends choosing sides, and two stubborn people insisting they will define their love story on their own terms.
You can argue about the ethics of how it started. What is harder to deny is that more than a decade in, the rock bard and the Hollywood mermaid are still together, still making protest art, still annoying their critics, and still giving classic rock fans something to gossip about between spins of After the Gold Rush.
