Neil Young - Mirror Ball

One of the great unexpected collaborations in rock history, and one of the best albums of Neil Young's remarkable career. The story begins at a Voters for Choice benefit concert in Washington DC in January 1995, where Young performed with Pearl Jam and was so electrified by the experience that he flew to Seattle just eleven days later with a guitar and an amp and nothing else. Within four days of studio time at Bad Animals Studio, the recording facility owned by Heart's Ann and Nancy Wilson, Mirror Ball was essentially done.

Young wrote nearly all of the album's songs during those four recording sessions, with producer Brendan O'Brien capturing the performances largely as they happened, almost entirely from the rough board mixes. As engineer Brett Eliason recalls, "90 to 95 percent were just the rough mixes that were up on the console. That's Neil. If it was feeling right at the time, it's done." What you hear is quite literally what happened in that room. Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard, Mike McCready, Jeff Ament, and Jack Irons play with the intuitive locked-in power of a band who had spent years finding their sound, and the result is one of the most gloriously raw and alive analog recordings of the decade.

Standout tracks "I'm the Ocean," "Throw Your Hatred Down," and lead single "Downtown," which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Song, showcase a fifty-year-old rock legend drawing genuine inspiration from the younger generation he had helped shape. Due to legal complications between their respective record labels, only Young's name appears on the album sleeve, a detail that Pearl Jam have since described as one of their few regrets about the project.

Released on June 27, 1995 and certified gold by the RIAA, Mirror Ball remains a one-of-a-kind document of two of rock's greatest forces finding each other at exactly the right moment.