Homegrown's alright with me - homegrown is the way it should be

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

26/06/20 : Homegrown - Neil Young


What?!?  I had to suffer six of his albums (and one with CS&N) on the Rolling Stone list and I was hoping to never have to visit him ever again - how is this happening?  Sigh.  It's fair to say I do not have high expectations for this.

And well, I guess it's not terrible and if you like Neil Young I struggle to imagine any there's any reason that you won't like this.  I actually quite liked "White Line" but this was balanced by the strange monologue of "Florida" which I hated - the rest of it I merely shrugged my shoulders at and went "it's just Neil being Neil".  I was wondering from the title whether he's re-recorded old songs on this album, but then I realised that I'd have no idea whether they were old songs or not, so gave up wondering (I'm sure Wikipedia will let me know when I get there!)

We're at #2 in the charts this week with a new entry - he managed three weeks before disappearing, which seems like a better effort than I was expecting.  The other new entries in the top ten were Bob Dylan (#1) and Phoebe Bridgers (#6) and they help make up another very familiar top ten for me with seven albums having already been reviewed, this one makes eight and next week will make nine - only Elton John's Diamonds has stayed hidden from me and we've still got another 137 weeks in which we might meet it!

Wikipedia tells an interesting story - it's his 40th album but is all old songs which were initially recorded in late 1974.  The album was planned for release in 1975, but they released Tonight's The Night (which I really didn't like) instead, so Homegrown just sat on the shelves for years.  It was then remastered and planned to be released for Record Store Day in 2020 - which was cancelled due to Covid, so they just chucked it out anyway.  Many more details are available on Wikipedia if you're interested - I was surprised how much I read about it!  The critics liked it and it did surprisingly well globally getting to #2 in five countries - probably kept off the top by his old mucker Bob.  It only got to #17 in the US and #51 in Canada though - which seems odd.

"Customers also listened to" a million albums featuring at least one of Crosby, Stills, Nash or Young - I imagine this album resulted in quite a few vinyl LPs being dug out of the backs of cupboards and some reminiscing of the good old days.  Which aren't the good old days for me (I was six at the time!) but I imagine if you like a bit of Neil then you'll like this.

19/06/20 - An album nobody was asking for
03/07/20 - We finally meet!

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