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Neil Young’s Lost Albums, Ranked
So many songs once poured out of Young it’s taken him decades to release them all.
Like all good rock-and-roll mythmaking, Briggs’s version of events doesn’t entirely hold up to scrutiny; Shakey clarifies elsewhere that Young started toying with “Powderfinger” in the late ’60s, and it wouldn’t exactly come as a shock to learn that the free-associative final verse on “Pocahontas” about the Astrodome and Marlon Brando was written in a drug-adjacent fit of inspiration. While that means the lost records don’t contain too many songs Neil-heads haven’t already heard in one form or another, they do provide a window into how Young chiseled a defining era of his career out of a massive slab of raw music. For instance, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could hide away a great song for almost 50 years that features Levon Helm on the drums, until you hear “Separate Ways,” the devastatingly intimate Homegrown opener about co-parenting amid a breakup (“Sharin’ our little boy / Who grew from joy back then”).
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