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But only love can break your heart
Try to be sure right from the start
Yes only love can break your heart
What if your world should fall apart?

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… the sublimely lovely songs like “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” which went into the Top 40 in 1970. And its success probably did not discourage the songwriter from recording the largely acoustic Harvest and its number one single, “Heart of Gold,” a year later. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” is the sort of song that is at once inimitable in style and yet almost universal in appeal and sentiment — perhaps to the point of seeming trite; the words are sort an update of sort on Tin Pan Alley songs like “You Always Hurt the One You Love,” and the wistful melody feels like it has also been around forever, though one would be hard-pressed to find it somewhere else.
~Bill Janovitz (allmusic.com)

Wikipedia:

Single by Neil Young
from the album After the Gold Rush
B-side	“Birds”
Released	September 19, 1970 October 19, 1970 (U.S. 7″ single)
Recorded	March 15, 1970
Genre	Rock
Length	3:05
Label	Reprise 45 0746
Writer(s)	Neil Young
Producer(s)	David Briggs, Neil Young

The song is the third track on Neil Young’s album After the Gold Rush. The song was supposedly written for Graham Nash after Nash’s split from Joni Mitchell, though Young in interviews has been somewhat tentative in admitting or remembering this. Released as single in October 1970, it became Young’s first top 40 hit as a solo artist, peaking at number 33 in the U.S. The single was issued with a Crazy Horse version of “Birds” (rather than the solo piano version of the album) on the B-side, apparently accidentally. The song is praised as a “seemingly simple song which display[s] considerable attention to detail in the deployment of instruments.”

Lyrics

When you were young
and on your own
How did it feel
to be alone?
I was always thinking
of games that I was playing.
Trying to make
the best of my time.

But only love
can break your heart
Try to be sure
right from the start
Yes only love
can break your heart
What if your world
should fall apart?

I have a friend
I’ve never seen
He hides his head
inside a dream
Someone should call him
and see if he can come out.
Try to lose
the down that he’s found.

But only love
can break your heart
Try to be sure
right from the start
Yes only love
can break your heart
What if your world
should fall apart?

I have a friend
I’ve never seen
He hides his head
inside a dream
Yes, only love
can break your heart
Yes, only love
can break your heart

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Live versions

From “Live At The Cellar Door” – performed Nov/Dec 1970:

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Royal Festival Hall, London – Feb 27, 1971

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Paul McCartney & Neil Young, Bridge School Benefit 2004

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Carnegie Hall, NYC – 1/9/14

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Cover versions

Saint Etienne

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Everlast

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Ricky Lee Jones:

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Kathleen Edwards @ King Tut’s, Glasgow – 2008

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-Egil