Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and Young's friend and roadie Bruce Berry had both died of drug overdoses in the months before the songs were written.

Berry leveraged his music industry connections to work as a roadie for both Young and Stephen Stills during his Manassas tour.

He died in November 1972 the night after Young fired him during rehearsals for the Time Fades Away tour due to his inability to play.

[8] The song was also inspired by several other artists Young had seen fall to heroin, as he explained to a January 1971 audience: "I got to see to see a lot of great musicians before they happened.

"[9] The title track "Tonight's the Night" mentions Berry by name, while Whitten's guitar and vocal work highlight "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown", taken from a March 1970 Crazy Horse concert at the Fillmore East.

It consisted of Young, Ben Keith, Nils Lofgren, and the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina.

The title track "Tonight's the Night" was written in Young's head, "without a guitar: I just heard the bass line.

In "Roll Another Number (For the Road)", written during the recording sessions, Young mourns the end of the Woodstock era, and the loss of members of that movement to drugs.

"Tired Eyes" was inspired by an April 1972 drug deal gone bad that ended in murder in Topanga Canyon,[10] an artistic community in Southern California where Young once lived: "That actually happened to a friend of mine.

In the summer of 1973, after the conclusion of the Time Fades Away tour, Young made another attempt to record with CSNY at his ranch, capturing the songs "See the Changes" and "Human Highway" with the group.

Young commandeered the facility's rehearsal space, knocked a hole through a wall to run cables and built a makeshift studio.

[18] Drummer Ralph Molina remembers the setting in an April 2023 interview: "We recorded Tonight’s The Night at Bruce’s brother’s rehearsal studio in Hollywood, the S.I.R.

"[19] Young explains further in an August 1975 interview with Cameron Crowe for Rolling Stone: "Tonight's The Night is like an OD letter.

When we played that music we were all thinking of Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry, two close members of our unit lost to junk overdoses.

At the conclusion of the sessions, the group performed the new repertoire in a series of inaugural concerts at the newly opened Roxy Theatre.

In a 1985 interview with Adam Swetting of The Melody Maker, Young explains that "The original Tonight's The Night was much heavier than the one that hit the stands.

After all the real smooth stuff Neil had been doing, David felt most critics and others simply failed to read what they should have into Tonight's the Night – that it was an artist making a giant growth step.

Young described the experience of sharing the album for the first time with his record company in a November 1978 Tony Schwartz interview for Newsweek: "When I handed it to Warner's, they hated it.

In spring 1974, he made a new attempt at the title track in an upbeat, power trio version recorded with Ralph Molina and Greg Reeves of CSNY.

An acetate of one such alternate version circulated as a bootleg and included the songs "Walk On", "For the Turnstiles", "Bad Fog of Loneliness", "Winterlong" and "Traces".

Archivist Joel Bernstein explained in an August 1988 interview: "There are a couple of Tonight's the Night acetates that have different running orders.

Young played the new album to a group of friends including members of The Band, and Tonight's the Night happened to be on the same reel.

Young explains in Waging Heavy Peace: "Ben Keith and I played the tapes one midnight in what is now known as the Belushi bungalow of Hollywood's Chateau Marmont Hotel for Rick Danko of The Band and some other musicians.

"[7] Young told Cameron Crowe how the final running order was selected: "I only had nine songs, so I set the whole thing aside and did On The Beach instead.

"[25]Included with the early original vinyl releases of Tonight's the Night is a cryptic message written by Young: "I'm sorry.

This text is reportedly the lyrics to a Homegrown-era unreleased song titled "Florida", characterized by McDonough as "a cockamamie spoken-word dream, set to the shrieking accompaniment of either Young or [Ben] Keith drawing a wet finger around the rim of a glass.

In Shakey, Young maintains that along with the inserts there was a small package of glitter inside the sleeve that was meant to fall out ("our Bowie statement"), spilling when the listener took the record out.

However, neither McDonough nor Young archivist Joel Bernstein have yet found a copy of Tonight's the Night featuring the glitter package.

[3] Dave Marsh wrote in the original Rolling Stone review: The music has a feeling of offhand, first-take crudity matched recently only by Blood on the Tracks, almost as though Young wanted us to miss its ultimate majesty in order to emphasize its ragged edge of desolation.

[...] More than any of Young's earlier songs and albums—even the despondent On the Beach and the mordant, rancorous Time Fades Away—Tonight's the Night is preoccupied with death and disaster.