She was absolutely fearless,” Neil Young tells Rolling Stone of Larson. “She told me, ‘I’m the best one. I can follow you anywhere you want to go. No one can follow you better than I can.’ And she could.” (Rolling Stone)
She is perhaps best known for her work in the late 1970s with Neil Young and her 1978 hit single of Young's "Lotta Love", which hit No. 1 on the Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks chart[1] and No. 8 on the pop singles chart. It was followed by four more adult contemporary hits, two of which were also minor pop hits.
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.
But Larson’s time in the spotlight was extremely brief. Though she continued to make albums with Templeman into the next decade, she failed to become a star like her friend and roommate Linda Ronstadt. She ventured into country in the mid-Eighties, released a children’s lullaby album in 1994, and unexpectedly died of a cerebral edema in 1997. At the time, she was married to drummer Russ Kunkel and raising a seven-year-old daughter. She was just 45 years old.
