Neil Young Finally Issues Unreleased 1975 ‘Homegrown’ Album

Finally seeing release today (June 19th) is Neil Young's 1975 “missing album,” Homegrown. Rather than release Homegrown in 1975, Young shelved the project and issued his then-unreleased 1973 album Tonight's The Night in its place.

Young has described Homegrown as being “the missing link between (1972's) Harvest, (1978's) Comes A Time, (1985's) Old Ways, and (1992's) Harvest Moon.”

Upon announcing the album, Young posted on his Neil Young Archives site: “(Homegrown) is all analog! The purest sound. Hear the vinyl. Get a nice phonograph player. This is the record to do that on! My first ever narration with Ben 'Longgrain' Keith and live sound effects. Some beautiful music and fun rockin' songs as well. This is the one that got away. I am stoked to share this with you.”

Neil Young told us that over the course of his career, he's happy to have a diverse community of musicians that he can pick and choose from to help serve his music on a project-by-project basis: “Generally, if I'm writing some real rock n' roll songs and some real basic, primitive rock n' roll songs, usually I'll go to Crazy Horse. And if I'm writing more complicated songs or things that are, are more complex or, y'know, where the rhythm patterns are different and they require a little more refinement, then I'll go somewhere else.”

During a chat with the Musicians Hall of Fame & Museum, Neil Young spoke about a longing for music to take a more organic path going forward: “I really pray for a renaissance of real homemade music, where people actually play together and play off each other. That, to me, is what music's all about. And as we move more and more into the digital age of Pro Tools and putting things on a grid and organizing things and sampling and everything. . . I'm not puttin' it down, but I am sayin' that when they actually play together, that's a whole time that has to be preserved.”