As we know by now, Neil Young kinda just does his own thing. ‘Chrome Dreams’ was originally supposed to be released in 1977 but Young changed his mind. Although it has been heard on bootlegs and, weirdly, Neil Young has subsequently released the sequel ‘Chrome Dreams II’, this is the first time the complete album has been released how Young intended it.
For decades, an acetate copy of Neil Young’s lost 1977 album—“Chrome Dreams” was heavily circulated in fan circles, but it never went any further than that. Initially, the project was meant to be a proper follow-up to his 1975 Crazy Horse record “Zuma”. It was Young, who’d put out “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere”, “After the Gold Rush”, “Harvest”, “On the Beach”, “Tonight’s the Night” and “Zuma” all in a six-year period, that was still on fresh legs and at the pinnacle of his game.
1977 was meant to be a banner year for Young. He’d just released “Long May You Run” with former CSNY bandmate Stephen Stills the previous autumn, but he’d also compiled numerous songs between 1974 and 1976 and had nowhere to put them under his own name. From what we know now, because of Young’s vault of bootlegs and “lost” projects, he also recorded “Homegrown” and “Hitchhiker” around that time, too—but both albums went unreleased for decades. “Chrome Dreams“, despite being banished to a similar fate, feels like the most fully-formed of the three.
Recorded everywhere from Indigo Ranch Studio in Malibu, California to Quadrafonic Sound Studios in Nashville, Tennessee to Hammersmith Apollo in London, “Chrome Dreams” is not just a living, breathing full moon; it’s a document of a prolific, all-time era in Young’s career that never truly was. In 1977, he released the middle-of-the-road “American Stars ‘n Bars” which was heavily shouldered by “Like a Hurricane”—and then, in 1978, he put out his country-focused “Comes a Time” which was headlined by “Four Strong Winds,” a song Young didn’t even write. To make full sense of this recent run of the unvaullted “lost” album releases. We got “Hitchhiker” in 2017 and then “Homegrown” in 2020, two projects that feature much of the same content as “Chrome Dreams” and have also been deemed as “lost records.”
The Fat Angel Sings 