Neil Young - Unplugged

The story behind this album is as compelling as the music itself. Neil Young's first attempt at taping his MTV Unplugged set ended in chaos, with Young growing agitated mid-show and walking off stage down Broadway before it could be completed. He refused to allow the footage to air. Nearly two months later, in February 1993, he returned to Universal Studios in Los Angeles with a carefully chosen group of musicians he had worked with over the years, including three-fourths of the Stray Gators from the Harvest Moon sessions, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Nils Lofgren, and backing vocalists Nicolette Larson and Astrid Young. What they recorded that night was one of the most quietly extraordinary live albums of Young's career.

Spanning material from his late 1960s days with Buffalo Springfield all the way through to Harvest Moon, the set is full of the kind of unpredictable choices that only Young would make. "Transformer Man," originally cloaked in vocoder on 1981's Trans, is reborn in a spare, organic arrangement of startling beauty. "Pocahontas" and "Mr. Soul" are spellbinding. A pump organ arrangement of "Like a Hurricane" reinvents the song entirely. And "Stringman," a moving piano-and-voice piece originally intended for the legendary unreleased album Chrome Dreams, surfaces here as one of the album's most affecting moments, a small masterpiece that had been sitting in Young's vault since 1976.

Produced by David Briggs and released on June 15, 1993, Unplugged is a one-of-a-kind document from Young's 1990s canon and an essential addition to one of rock's greatest catalogs.