Review: Neil Young’s Homegrown Provides a Missing Link in the Artist’s Legacy

The album offers a homey, bittersweet charm largely unique to the troubadour’s legendary catalog.

Neil Young, Homegrown
Photo: Warner Records

Originally slated for release in 1975, Neil Young’s Homegrown was shelved at the last minute in favor of the fractured masterpiece Tonight’s the Night, and an alternate history in which the swap never happened is inconceivable. Young describes the album as “the unheard bridge between [1972’s] Harvest and [1978’s] Comes a Time,” but those two releases don’t comport with the haunted, ragged, and much less commercial music that Young was making in the mid-’70s. Friendlier and rootsier than the likes of Tonight’s the Night but more intimate than Harvest, Homegrown offers a homey, bittersweet charm largely unique to the troubadour’s legendary ’70s catalog.

It’s unlikely that any song on Homegrown would have become a hit back in 1975; the only probable contender is “Try,” a woozy after-hours honky-tonk come-on. With its barroom chumminess and bright backing vocals courtesy of Emmylou Harris, the song probably could have found a home on the radio, if not an all-day one, as it’s a bit too wry and cavalier to appeal to the masses who lapped up Harvest’s treacly “Heart of Gold” a few years earlier.

Indeed, rather than recreate the polish that made Harvest such a sensation, Young scaled back the presence of his all-star ensemble—including members of the Band, alongside familiar sidemen like bassist Tim Drummond and pedal steel stalwart Ben Keith—in favor of minimally arranged meditations. On pensive vignettes like the piano-based “Mexico” and the wispy “Little Wing” (previously released on 1980’s Hawks & Doves), Young’s patented brand of impressionistic memoir cuts deep.

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Like much of his work from this period, the material on Homegrown sees Young intent on stripping away all pretense and ego and exposing the pain that laid beneath. Just as Tonight’s the Night found him preoccupied with the tragic deaths of friends Danny Whitten and Bill Berry, he’s dogged by the dissolution of his relationship with actress Carrie Snodgrass throughout Homegrown. His inner turmoil is felt most keenly on the stunning “Kansas,” in which he awakes “from a bad dream” next to a woman whose name he doesn’t know. She’s lovely and kind, but he can’t take his mind off his difficult reality, surrounded as he is by the walls of “my bungalow of stucco that the glory and success bought.”

The album’s comparatively scant electric material is less consistent. The album’s stoner-anthem title track, a version of which later appeared on 1977’s American Stars ‘N Bars, is unquestionably one of the dumbest songs Young has ever written, while “We Don’t Smoke It No More” is a jokey white-boy blues vamp that serves only to indicate how profoundly stoned everyone performing it probably was. At the very least, these two songs poke holes in the perception that Young spent this entire period in a depressive, tequila-sodden haze.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to deny the raw emotion of tracks like “Vacancy,” a dark, rumbling rock song that could have easily fit on Tonight’s the Night. “Are you my friend/Are you my enemy?” Young sneers, sounding shaky and paranoid. But on Homegrown, it’s more of a passing thundercloud than an endless storm. “All your dreams and your lovers won’t protect you,” Young laments on “Star of Bethlehem,” deftly sequenced here as the album’s closer. “And yet,” he insists, “still a light is shining.” The album turns out to be missing link in Young’s catalog as much for Shakey’s emotional life as it is for his stylistic choices.

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 Label: Warner  Release Date: June 19, 2020  Buy: Amazon

Jeremy Winograd

Jeremy Winograd studied music and writing at Bennington College, where he did his senior thesis on Drive-By Truckers. He has written for Rolling Stone and Time Out New York. He and his wife met on a White Stripes message board.

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