Neil Young - Ranch Romances - Non-Album Tracks (1976)

I'm finishing sorting out Neil Young's prolific mid-1970s songwriting burst. I just posted "Dume" to gather the rest of his stray tracks from 1974 and 1975. This album gathers most of his 1976 stray tracks. I will follow this with a revised version of "Shots" to collect the rest of 1976, plus songs from 1977 and 1978.

Neil Young wrote so many excellent songs in the mid-1970s that he didn't know what to do with them all. There were numerous "lost albums," meaning albums he considered but ultimately didn't release. "Homegrown" is one such 1975 album that was finally released in 2020. "Hitchhiker" was a proposed 1976 album that was released in 2017. But there were more. Around 1976, "Mediterranean," "Chrome Dreams," and "Ranch Romances" were all titles that were considered. I have no idea what the actual song lists were for any of these. I've simply taken the stray tracks from early to mid-1976 and gathered them here. I could have easily chosen another name, but "Ranch Romances" appealed to me. If anyone knows more about these proposed albums and which songs exactly were supposed to be on them, please let me know.

I've already posted a series of albums in which I maximized the number of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young songs and albums. For these albums, I'm doing the opposite, imagining that Young put out all his songs on his solo albums shortly after he wrote and recorded them. As part of that, I'm acting as if the Stills-Young Band album "Long May You Run" next happened. I've included four songs from that - "Let It Shine," "Midnight on the Bay," "Fountainbleau" and "Ocean Girl" - but only "Ocean Girl" is the exact same version as the one on that album.

I've been able to update my Neil Young stray tracks albums due to the release of the "Archives, Volume II" box set in late 2020. But note there are a number of previously unreleased alternate versions on there that I'm not including on any of these albums. Also, the material from that ends in mid-1976. The impact of that here is that I presume a version of the still unreleased song "Evening Coconut" will appear on "Archives, Volume III," whenever that comes out. For now, we have to make do with this slightly rough bootleg version. It's the exact same situation with "Sad Movies," except the song quality of this bootleg version is excellent.

The song "Campaigner" first appeared on the 1977 best of compilation album "Decade." It turns out that version was the exact same version on "Hitchhiker," except that one verse was edited out. I've used the longer version. 

A couple of the other songs here eventually came out on other releases. A live version of "Stringman" was released on the 1993 album "Unplugged." A new version of "Hitchhiker" first came out on the 2010 album "La Noise," then the original 1976 version came out on the 2017 album also called "Hitchhiker."

01 Campaigner [Long Version] (Neil Young)
02 Let It Shine (Neil Young)
03 Sad Movies (Neil Young)
04 Midnight on the Bay (Neil Young)
05 Stringman (Neil Young)
06 Fontainebleau (Stills-Young Band)
07 Evening Coconut (Stills-Young Band)
08 Ocean Girl (Stills-Young Band)
09 Mediterranean (Neil Young)
10 Hitchhiker (Neil Young)

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At the time Young wrote these songs, he owned a ranch and he was having a lot of romantic trouble, breaking up with his romantic partner of several years, Carrie Snodgress, in 1975. So maybe that's why he wanted to call an album "Ranch Romances." But I found out there were a series of pulp novels in the 1970s called "Ranch Romances," and maybe that played into his thinking. For the album title text, I used the exact font taken from the cover of one of the novels. All the novel covers used the exact same font and style.

As for the cover photo, I found it with a Rolling Stone magazine article about the "Archives, Volume II" box set. It looks like it dates from that time period, but I don't know the exact details.