Midnight Oil - Unplugged, Sony Studios, New York City, 4-20-1993

In 1993, MTV's "unplugged" phenomenon was all the rage, to the point that even Midnight Oil decided to get in on it. Midnight Oil is a rocking band, but a lot of their songs have an acoustic base, such as the urgent guitar strumming to their hit "Beds Are Burning." So the idea worked well, although admittedly the band bent the concept a bit by still having bass and drums.

The band's unplugged performance was shown on TV at the time, but no album of it was ever released. (A DVD of it was included on their 2017 box set of rarities "Overflow Tank," but strangely, that was missing one song.) So here it is. I think it's an excellent concert, with great sound. It's kind of like their greatest hits up until 1993 (and most of their hits were from before then), but with a semi-acoustic twist.

It's a fairly long concert compared to how these things usually go, at an hour and 34 minutes. I'm guessing MTV only broadcast parts of it to fit it into an hour, but I'm not sure.  I didn't have to do much tweaking. But there's a fair amount of talking, and I broke all of that into separate tracks.

By the way, the band later did some more acoustic stuff, especially around the year 2002. I've compiled that into another album, and I'll post that at a later time.

UPDATE: On March 2023, I updated the mp3 download file. The music is exactly the same, but I changed the cover, after finding a much better photo for it.

01 talk (Midnight Oil)
02 Feeding Frenzy (Midnight Oil)
03 talk (Midnight Oil)
04 Sell My Soul (Midnight Oil)
05 talk (Midnight Oil)
06 Short Memory (Midnight Oil)
07 talk (Midnight Oil)
08 Tell Me the Truth (Midnight Oil)
09 Blue Sky Mine (Midnight Oil)
10 talk (Midnight Oil)
11 Lucky Country (Midnight Oil)
12 Now or Never Land (Midnight Oil)
13 talk (Midnight Oil)
14 Antarctica (Midnight Oil)
15 talk (Midnight Oil)
16 The Dead Heart (Midnight Oil)
17 In the Valley (Midnight Oil)
18 Beds Are Burning (Midnight Oil)
19 One Country (Midnight Oil)
20 talk (Midnight Oil)
21 Earth and Sun and Moon (Midnight Oil)
22 talk (Midnight Oil)
23 Truganini (Midnight Oil)
24 Drums of Heaven (Midnight Oil)
25 talk (Midnight Oil)
26 My Country (Midnight Oil)
27 Warakurna (Midnight Oil)
28 We Gotta Get Out of This Place (Midnight Oil)

https://www.imagenetz.de/i822S

For the album cover, I took a screenshot from a YouTube video of the Unplugged concert.