(Warner)Recorded after a relationship breakdown then never released, this mid-70s set has a pleasurable lightness of touch rather than big statement songs
It feels apt that the tapes began rolling on Homegrown after the
music had started, so that the first you hear of it is the middle of a fat bass note in the opening bars of Separate Ways and the wobble of an analogue tape machine getting up to speed. It’s as if Neil Young were simply dipping a bucket into the ceaseless river of music that seemed to flow through him in the 70s. The flow was so strong he simply couldn’t keep up: Homegrown is the second previously unreleased studio album from the decade from Young’s Archives series, following Hitchhiker, the 1976 album released in 2017. Last year he mooted another 29 archival releases, including a further three studio albums from the 70s, as well as Lincvolt Chronicles 1-5, which is, per Rolling Stone, “an in-depth look at Young’s attempt to turn his 1959 Lincoln Continental into a hybrid electric vehicle”, and which may be only for those who felt 2003’s rock opera Greendale was too cravenly commercial.
Homegrown was recorded almost entirely in December 1974 and January 1975 after Young split up with his partner Carrie Snodgress, then cancelled in 1975 because he felt it was too personal. Instead, he released Tonight’s the Night, a desolate album concerned with two deaths. While Homegrown might have seemed personal to Young, it sounds breezy compared with Tonight’s the Night or the album that preceded it, On the Beach.