Neil Young, “Chrome Dreams.”

Expressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh told his brother Theo to never let anyone see his paintings. Luckily for us, Theo didn’t listen. In 1977, Neil Young made the inexplicable decision to shelve an album of songs recorded between 1974 and 1977.

Luckily for us, Chrome Dreams is finally seeing the light of day. More than just a time capsule, the album in its original form is a boon for any Young fan as well as strong evidence that he was way ahead of his time.

While many of these songs were released elsewhere, Young’s latest album from the vault reveals the track list as he intended it, before his artistic whims took him in another direction. Fans circulated bootlegs of the album during the ’70s and many critics at the time thought it could’ve been Young’s most successful of the decade.

He played all of the instruments on gentle acoustic number “Will to Love,” overdubbing tasty wah-wah-inflected guitar over delicate acoustic strumming. The song, which ended up on one of his other 1977 albums, American Stars ‘N’ Bars, is remarkable for how much it sounds like The Flaming Lips, “Vein of Stars,” released 30 years later.

“Like a Hurricane,” which wound up on 1977’s Decade, features the kind of noisy guitar solos that would become the stock and trade of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. The wailing, overdriven guitars drive home the song’s metaphorical storm and give voice to the song’s central point: that heaven hath no beauty like a woman storm (or something like that).

“You are like a hurricane/ There’s calm in your eye/ And I’m gettin’ blown away/ To somewhere safer where the feeling stays/ I want to love you but I’m getting blown away,” he sings.

A few of the songs differ markedly from other releases. “Sedan Delivery” is a bit slower and less punk than the live version released on 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps. Chrome Dreams’ “Holding Back the Tears” feels more like an acoustic demo than the version that made it onto American Stars ‘N’ Bars. The version here lacks the backing vocals by Linda Ronstadt that graced the previously released version.

Perhaps the most obscure track on Chrome Dreams is gentle piano ballad “Stringman,” which saw the light of day only on 1993’s Unplugged album and the Odeon/Budokan disc in Archives Vol. II, released in 2020. The lyrics capture the disillusionment of the 1970s.

“On his shoulder rests a violin/ For his head where chaos reigns/ But his heart can’t find a simple way/ To live with all those things,” Young sings.

The ’70s were such a prolific time for Neil Young as a songwriter that his record label simply couldn’t keep up. In the last decade, he’s been releasing this old material. Chrome Dreams is not only a must-have for the Neil Young completist. The album feels like a living history lesson composed of songs rather than the usual facts and figures.

Follow writer David Gill at Twitter.com/saxum_paternus.