Eight-time Grammy winner Beck has put his stamp on a Neil Young classic, covering “Old Man” off 1972’s Harvest for an NBC Sports NFL ad. The spot featuring Beck’s take on the track aired during NFL Sunday Night Football, with the cover now released as a standalone digital single.
A black-and-white Beck performs the cover solo in the promo for next week’s game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Kansas City Chiefs, which uses Young’s lyric “24 and there’s so much more” to highlight the opposing quarterbacks, Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes, who each won a championship at age 24.
It’s a faithful cover of an untouchable track: Beck does an impressive job of following in Young’s vocal footsteps, accompanied only by a second acoustic guitar, a set of backing singers in the chorus and, eventually, strings so faint, you can hardly tell they’re there.
Compare Beck’s “Old Man” cover to the original below, and find Beck and Young sessions from the Paste archives further down.