Songfacts®:

• "Round and Round (It Won't be Long)" is a pretty song about time and mortality. It extends the theme of "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," which immediately precedes this song on the album.
  
  In "Everybody Knows," Young sang about the hectic pace of his life and yearning for the simple, slow tempo of his small-town childhood home. In "Round and Round," we see those sentiments broadened and made more abstract.
• The song is built around the lyrics:
  
  Round and round and round we spin
  To weave a wall to hem us in
  
  The line calls to mind the futile business of life, with everyone preoccupied with activities that ultimately imprison them. It's stated somewhat abstractly here, but Young has a clear pattern throughout his career of seeing modern life in this way. He was already exploring this existential theme in "Here We Are In The Years," released less than four months earlier on his debut album.
• There are some mysterious phrases in this song, such as:
  
  How slow and slow it goes
  To mend the tear that always shows
  It won't be long, it won't be long
  
  The verse:
  
  It's hard enough losin'
  The paper illusion
  You've hidden inside
  
  Is about losing our idealistic views of the world and having to "step on your pride and cry."
  
  The most haunting verse is the last:
  
  How the hours will bend
  Through the time that you spend
  Till you turn to your eyes
  And you see your best friend
  looking over the end
  and you turn to see why,
  And he looks in your eyes and he cries
  
  Here we find Young with his usual fatalism summarizing the theme of the song with an image of the dark abyss that is time and our own mortality. Not exactly happy or hopeful, Young nonetheless manages to make it beautiful.
• Joni Mitchell has cited Young's "Sugar Mountain" as an inspiration for her song "The Circle Game," but it's interesting to note that the latter bears a strong similarity to Young's "Round and Round." Both songs are about time, age, and mortality, and both have a chorus that includes "round and round and round," with "round" repeated three times in each.
• Young wrote this in his cabin and originally intended it for his group Buffalo Springfield.
• Robin Lane sang harmonizing vocals on this song. In the '80s she had a band named Robin Lane and the Chartbusters. They released three albums with Warner Brothers and had one of the earliest MTV hits with "When Things Go Wrong" in 1981. She later started Songbird Sings, which helps people work out their trauma through music. In Shakey, she talked about the recording process with Neil Young. "I thought we were just rehearsing," she said. "I didn't even know what I was singing... Neil was the original punk rocker."