Unplugged

Until this album, his twelfth in eighteen years and an American No. 1, Eric Clapton had lived through a tumultuous half-life: drug dependence, alcoholism and a broken marriage. ‘Tumultuous’ hardly covers it; perhaps he had simply been a hopeless man. Then, as if further misfortune pursued him, his four-year-old son Conor died in an accident in 1991. ‘Tears in Heaven’ is dedicated to him, and Unplugged exists to let us hear that great song.

The single hit was the laid-back arrangement of ‘Layla,’ but the song that makes me weep however many times I hear it is ‘Tears in Heaven.’ Listening to this live album by an eight-person acoustic band tells me nothing of how Clapton's private life fared afterwards. Perhaps, in that sense, this richly genre-blending record marks his farewell to his tempestuous life—or to his own hopelessness. The two-LP edition released in 2011 astonishes with the vivid atmosphere of its performance.