In retrospect, a lot of the best MTV Unplugged episodes were farewell performances. While the episodes featuring Nirvana and Alice In Chains now seem like funerals for their lead singers in advance of their deaths, the 10,000 Maniacs set sounds more like a bittersweet going-away party for Natalie Merchant, who had decided to leave the band to embark on a solo career shortly before it was recorded. The set list for 10,000 Maniacs’ MTV Unplugged is heavy on material from their then-recent Our Time in Eden album, but is also effectively a greatest-hits collection showcasing the most widely beloved songs from In My Tribe and Blind Man’s Zoo. The Unplugged premise doesn’t do much to change the style of the songs, which rarely included much in the way of distortion or electronic elements, but the live energy adds a bit of kick to uptempo numbers like “Candy Everybody Wants” and “Hey Jack Kerouac”. The most significantly reworked songs, “Eat for Two” and “Don’t Talk”, are much more melancholy and elegiac in their all-acoustic arrangements. The only song on MTV Unplugged that had not appeared on a previous 10,000 Maniacs album is a cover of Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen’s ballad “Because the Night”, which would become the group’s biggest hit. The song is perfectly suited to Merchant’s voice—she effortlessly inhabits Smith’s literary romanticism, while the more obviously Springsteenian qualities of the song pushed the band towards a passionate bombast they’d mostly shied away from through their career.