Songfacts®:

• Young recorded this song at Village Studios in Los Angeles on January 21, 1975, but it wasn't released until June 2020. That's the story with most the songs on Homegrown.
  
  Young wrote and recorded all the tunes for the album while dealing with the pain of his breakup with actress Carrie Snodgress, the mother of his first child (son Zeke). Some of the songs on the album deal with the subject unambiguously (notably "Separate Ways"), but this one is less specific.
  
  "Mexico" has Young singing wistfully about going to Mexico to slow down and live a simple life. The opening verse, though, does indicate the Snodgress anguish with the lines:
  
  Why is it so hard to hang on
  To your love
  Oh, the things we do
  
  The pair broke up because Snodgress had been sleeping around on Young, which may have inspired the statement "oh, the things we do." Of course, as Young later said in the book Shakey, he too was sleeping around on Snodgress. He admitted it took him some time to see his own hypocrisy, but maybe even back in '75 he got a whiff of it. He does say "the things WE do," after all.
• The song is reminiscent of Young's 1975 track "Albuquerque" in that it has vague lyrics about a yearning to escape to a seemingly random place. In both songs, the location is in the title and at the core of the song, but there doesn't seem to be anything particularly special about it other than that it's somewhere far away.
• The first time Young ever played this live was December 9, 2007 when he was performing at The Tower Theatre in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, as part of his Chrome Dreams tour. We know it's the first time he did it live because he opened the performances by jokingly asking the audience to remain perfectly quiet because it was the first time he ever played it.
  
  This version is on the unofficially released 4-CD Chrome Dreams II Tour set released by the Original Master Series label.
• This is one of three Homegrown songs with a place as a title, the others being "Florida" and "Kansas." If you add "Star of Bethlehem," there are four songs with geographic places in the title.
• At 1:40, this is the shortest track on Homegrown.