Neil Young’s new album — the ‘one that got away’ 45 years ago

‘It never gets to the bitterness levels Dylan excels at with exes...’

NEAR enough to this time last year — July 14 in Nowlan Park — Neil Young played one of the shows of 2019. It was the hottest day of the summer as tribal drums boomed out across Kilkenny, and the 73-year-old opened with Like an Inca, from his 1992 album Trans. Addressing the 50,000 crowd, he asked the question: “Who put the bomb on the sacred altar?”

Young then performed at eardrum-denting volume songs from the Neil Young and Crazy Horse 1990 album

Ragged Glory, followed by tracks from 1995’s Mirror Ball. There was perhaps less intensity in Heart of Gold — the song from his 1972 album Harvest — but this mellow masterpiece got the biggest applause of the night — apart from, perhaps, when Young joined headliner Bob Dylan onstage hours later.

Harvest was supposed to be followed up by Homegrown, an album recorded in 1974 and ’75, but it never saw a release. Until last week.

“I apologise,” Young said of this great lost album. “Homegrown should have been there for you a couple of years after Harvest.” (He released Tonight’s the Night in its place.) “It’s the sad side of a love affair. The damage done. The heartache,” he added, referring to the painful breakup with actress Carrie Snodgress, mother of his first child, Zeke. (Snodgress died in 2004 of heart failure while waiting for a liver transplant.)

“I just couldn’t listen to it. I wanted to move on. So I kept it to myself, hidden away in the vault, on the shelf, in the back of my mind. But I should have shared it. It’s actually beautiful. That’s why I made it in the first place. Sometimes life hurts. You know what

I mean. This is the one that got away.”

Forty-five years since it was recorded,

Homegrown is almost worth the wait. It opens with Separate Ways, which sounds like Heart of Gold rebooted. Young, making this private moment of release public, sings: “I’m feeling better now/A bit more alive, somehow”. This is followed by the slow country rock of

Try, with Emmylou Harris on harmony vocals: “Darling, the door is open to my heart and I’ve been hoping you won’t be the one to struggle with the key”. You may struggle with comprehending the slightly surreal (and Rainy Day Women-esque) harmonica-rave that is We Don’t Smoke

It No More, with Young unburdening himself thus: “We don’t snort it, we don’t lick it, we don’t knock it, we don’t get it, we don’t smoke it no more”.

The most beautiful track of the 12 on Homegrown is Love is a Rose, with its darker message, as Rolling Stone put it, of how love fades like a rose stripped off the vine. The mood on Kansas is downcast too: “I feel like I just woke up from a bad dream... It doesn’t matter if you’re the one/’Cause we’ ll know before we’re done”.

Homegrown, despite the subject matter, never quite gets to the levels of bitterness that Dylan excels at with exes. The closest Young gets to that is when he sings on Vacancy: “Can we pretend to live in harmony?” (Once this existential troubadour is not pretending to sing in harmony, he will be okay.)

The man who sang Only Love Can Break Your Heart in 1970 still believes in the power and the pain of love.