Chrome Dreams II: Two Epics and the Short Songs Between Them

Neil Young’s Chrome Dreams II arrives in 2007 as a sequel in name only. There is no original Chrome Dreams on record store shelves — that album never got a proper release — so this is Young picking up a title and running somewhere new with it. The record swings between compact rock songs and two long, wandering pieces, and it asks the listener to sit with both extremes rather than pick one mode and stay there.

Ten Songs

The track list runs ten songs: Beautiful Bluebird, Boxcar, Ordinary People, Shining Light, The Believer, Spirit Road, Dirty Old Man, Ever After, No Hidden Path and The Way. Taken together, they run roughly 66 minutes. That number matters because it sets expectations for the record before a single song plays. Ten tracks, sixty-six minutes, and two of those ten will end up carrying most of that time between them.

Walking the Track List

Beautiful Bluebird opens the record at 4:30, a clean, pleasing entry point that sets a warm tone before anything gets complicated. Boxcar follows at a lean 2:47, a short, direct song that keeps momentum without dragging. Between them, the album shows its two working modes early: the short song built to move fast, and the longer song built to sit and unfold.

Then comes Ordinary People, the record’s main feature at 18:13. It is the longest thing here by a wide margin, and its scale alone marks it as the track the album is built around. Nothing before it prepares a listener for a run that long, and nothing after it matches it save for one other song.

Shining Light and The Believer keep things tighter — 4:46 and 2:43 — before Spirit Road stretches out again at 6:35, a mid-length piece that bridges the album’s short songs and its epics. Dirty Old Man, at 3:20, is blunt and short, a change of pace after Spirit Road’s length. The record moves this way throughout, stretching out and then pulling back, never settling into one shape for long.

Ever After runs 3:35, a compact song that leads into the record’s second major statement: No Hidden Path, 14:33 long, the album’s second epic and its closing argument before the shorter material returns. The Way closes the record at 5:15, following directly after No Hidden Path and giving the album a quiet way down after that long stretch. By the time it ends, the record has made its case twice over — once with Ordinary People, once with No Hidden Path — and let the shorter songs carry the rest.

Short and Long, Side by Side

The record’s identity is really about contrast — the short songs against the two epics — and that contrast is worth laying out plainly.

That spread is the whole record in one table. Nothing else on Chrome Dreams II matters as much to its shape as the gap between a 2:43 song and an 18:13 one. The short songs never try to compete with the epics on scale, and the epics never bother sounding brief.

The Verdict

Ordinary People and No Hidden Path are the reason to put this record on. Together they run past thirty minutes and carry the weight of the album, giving it a scale the shorter songs don’t try to match. Beautiful Bluebird, Spirit Road and The Way do the work of holding the record together around those two long pieces, while Boxcar, Dirty Old Man, The Believer and Ever After keep things moving without asking for much attention.

Judged purely as a set of songs, Chrome Dreams II has real highlights in its two epics and enough short, solid tracks around them to justify a full listen straight through, start to finish, without a single song feeling like it does not belong.

2007 albums · album review · Chrome Dreams II · classic rock · Neil Young