Neil Young - It Might Have Been - Non-Album Tracks (1968-1972)

Neil Young was so prolific early in his career that he was leaving stray tracks off albums left and right. This album imagines if he would have gathered up all the songs he'd performed in the studio or on stage that weren't put on other albums or done as part of his CSNY collaboration. There's just enough material to have given him a very solid album between "After the Goldrush" and "Harvest" in 1971, a year in which he didn't release a studio album of original material.

I took some songs from live performances and then removed the crowd noise to make them fit in better with the other studio material. Some of these songs did appear on albums later, for instance "See the Sky about to Rain" made it onto "On the Beach" in 1974 (but done in a different style than the solo acoustic version here). "Sugar Mountain" was an early B-side that didn't get onto an album until the "Decade" collection in 1977. "Dance, Dance, Dance" later transformed into "Love Is a Rose," with a very similar verse melody. And so on.

No doubt there are other songs that he wrote around this time that he never put on album or even on his "Archives" collection. For instance, "You Know I Love You," which he apparently played just once in concert, in early 1969, but it didn't get bootlegged.

If you add up the material I could find for this, it makes up a 37 minute album, which is a decent album length for that era.

01 Winterlong (Neil Young)
02 Dance, Dance, Dance (Neil Young)
03 Wonderin' (Neil Young)
04 Sugar Mountain (Neil Young)
05 Everybody's Alone (Neil Young)
06 It Might Have Been (Neil Young)
07 Journey through the Past (Neil Young)
08 Don't Let It Bring You Down (Neil Young)
09 Soldier (Neil Young)
10 War Song (Neil Young with Graham Nash)
11 Bad Fog of Loneliness (Neil Young)
12 See the Sky about to Rain (Neil Young)
13 Love in Mind (Neil Young)

https://www.imagenetz.de/kNA2c

I'm not entirely sure where the cover art photo comes from. But I think it dates to 1972.