Neil Young is finally giving fans the chance to hear his famously unreleased 1975 album Homegrown.

The LP came close to being unveiled as planned nearly 45 years ago, but Young decided at the last moment to put out Tonight’s The Night instead.

Homegrown will be our first release of 2020, sounding great in vinyl – as it was meant to be,” he wrote on his website. “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.” He added that it was “the unheard bridge between Harvest and Comes a Time.”

Rolling Stone reported that Young had put the album together during a period when his marriage had broken down and relations with his Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young colleagues were at a low ebb. “I’m sure parts of Homegrown will surface on other albums of mine,” he said in 1975. “That record might be more what people would rather hear from me now, but it was just a very down album. It was the darker side to Harvest. A lot of the songs had to do with me breaking up with my old lady. It was a little too personal… it scared me.” He continued: “I don’t want to get down to the point where I can’t even get up. I mean there’s something to going down there and looking around, but I don’t know about sticking around.”

In his new post, Young released a video clip of producer John Hanlon mastering the album “in an all analog chain,” reporting: “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.”

 

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