Neil Young: Unplugged (2LP) [REPRISE]

Why you'll love it

This 2LP set gives the show room to breathe across three sides, with a broken-arrow etching on side D and a 12" x 12" Neil Young Archives print. Young digs deep into his songbook, from Buffalo Springfield's "Mr. Soul" to a rare "Stringman."

This edition

• 2LP set
• Etched side D
• Neil Young Archives print
• Lyric inner sleeve

About the album

Plenty of artists treated MTV Unplugged as a chance to sit on a stool and be polite. Neil Young treated it as a chance to rearrange a career's worth of songs, recording his set on February 7, 1993, with a band of old friends around him.

Nils Lofgren plays guitar, autoharp and accordion, Ben Keith adds Dobro, Spooner Oldham sits at the piano and pump organ, and Nicolette Larson and Astrid Young sing harmony, with David Briggs producing. "The Needle And The Damage Done" and "Helpless" are as tender as ever, "Like A Hurricane" is reborn on pump organ, "Transformer Man" trades its synths for strings and wood, and "Long May You Run" and "From Hank To Hendrix" glow. "Stringman" was written for his Chrome Dreams project and finally gets its moment here.

It's warm, intimate and quietly brilliant, the sound of a great songwriter enjoying his own back catalogue. On "Harvest Moon" Larry Cragg is credited with playing the broom, which is the most useful thing anyone has ever done with one in a recording studio.

Also at Kops: more Neil Young on vinyl · browse CDN Pop / Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Reprise, a reissue of the 1993 live album.