There are some musical performers who are as comfortable as an old favorite sweater.

You can always count on them to deliver the same thing consistently. There are no real surprises when you get one of their new recordings — in fact you can pretty much predict what will be on an album before you buy it.

While that might be a bit boring, it does have the redeeming quality of being a certainty in an uncertain world.

On the other hand, there are those artists from whom you never know what you're going to get. Each recording they do is such a radical change from what they did before, that it's almost a crapshoot whether you're even going to enjoy what they put out each time.

These are the artists whose work is always exciting and challenging, and are guaranteed to make your life a little more interesting. In the current climate — where pop music plays it as safe as possible, and strives to recreate a successful formula over and over again — they are like a breath of fresh air. No matter how jarring they can be at times.

But there is a far rarer breed of animal then either one of those two, and that is the performer who has managed to combine both of those elements. Always challenging and never pigeon-holed, yet at the same time so talented that you feel that no matter what they do it's worthwhile. You get the same guarantee of certainty that you did with the guy who does the same thing over and over again.

Although, there aren't too many of those anymore, I do know of one.

I can't remember a time in pop music when Neil Young wasn't putting out recordings. From the time, I became aware that there was such a thing as rock and roll, Neil has been churning the stuff out.

From his extremely early days at The Riverboat in Toronto, Ontario — showing up in California driving a hearse and becoming part of Buffalo Springfield — to the retired country farmer that he seems to have become now as he has aged, Neil Young has been continually lurking around the edges of stardom.

But that's not something that's likely to ever happen in the "celebrity" sense of the word — he's just far too uncompromising when it comes to his music. He does what he feels like, when he feels like, and with whom he feels like doing it. Neil Young has done this his whole career. Whether working with his band Crazy Horse, touring with the Shocking Pinks performing rockabilly, or even that scary period when he put out Trans where he played with electronic music, he's never given a rat's ass for whatever anyone else has thought.