There is no clearer sign that Neil Young is a man who likes to get things done than the fact that there was little over a week between him deciding he wanted to make a record with Pearl Jam and the moment he rocked up in Seattle with nothing but a guitar and an amp. It was early 1995 and Young was already long-established as rock royalty but for the purposes of the album that would become Mirror Ball, he left his status at the city limits. Young wanted the collaborative record with the grunge rockers to tap into the sound that had made Eddie Vedder’s crew one of the biggest bands of the 90s. He didn’t even bring a roadie.
“I decided rather than adding the complexity of using my own producer, I’d use theirs,” Young explained in the career-spanning opus Pearl Jam Twenty. “We got rid of everything individual on my side and all of my trappings, so it was just me going in there by myself… The whole idea was to do it as fast and fresh as possible. I didn’t want it to drag on.”
