Neil Young’s unreleased album Homegrown which he recorded in 1975 will be released in 2020. Young said he was on the verge of releasing it decades ago but decided to shelve it at the last minute, in favor of Tonight’s The Night. He originally recorded Homegrown at a time in his career when new songs were coming to him at an incredible pace, many of them inspired by his painful split with girlfriend Carrie Snodgress. “It was a little too personal,” Young told Rolling Stone‘s Cameron Crowe back in 1975 that the album, “It scared me. I’ve never released any of those. And I probably never will. I think I’d be too embarrassed to put them out. They’re a little too real.”
Recently a fan wrote to Young expressing that his uncle is struggling and he was afraid that he wouldn’t live to hear all of Young’s unreleased music. Neil then wrote that this situation made him feel upset or rather “Bummed out,” and he wanted to do something about it. The singer said there may be a slew of original material, that he had created, released in the year 2020.
As 2020 approaches, fans can appreciate the new material that has finally surfaced. Young describes it as, “A record full of love lost and explorations. A record that has been hidden for decades. Too personal and revealing to expose in the freshness of those times…The unheard bridge between Harvest and Comes a Time, Homegrown is coming to NYA first in 2020.”
Young made the announcement in a post on his Neil Young Archives website with a video of producer John Hanlon working on it. “Mr. J. Hanlon is seen here mastering Homegrown in an all analog chain,” Young writes. “This is the way records were made when we started out. This is the way we made them sound great. We were told that this was impossible now, the Homegrown tapes were too damaged to use; we had to use Digital. We didn’t agree. We did not accept. We painstakingly restored the analog masters of Homegrown.”
Fans have to be subscribed to his personal archives in order to enjoy the possible new tunes at a fairly decent price. The archives will have, “tier[s] at NYA, possibly including On-Demand videos, movies and records, plus NYA’s exclusive content for Uncle Eddie’s tier (as yet unnamed),” Young writes. Rolling Stone quoted Young saying, “Your subscription price will be higher for this tier. More changes will be added as we discuss this.”
On a personal note, Neil Young and Daryl Hannah were reported to have wed on August 25, 2018 in Atascadero, California. Young confirmed his marriage to Hannah in a video released on October 31, 2018. He is an environmentalist and outspoken advocate for the welfare of small farmers, having co-founded in 1985 the benefit concert Farm Aid. He is also working on a documentary about electric car technology, tentatively titled LincVolt.