NEIL YOUNG, Mirror Ball: Letras, Celeste Ediciones / El Sueño del Cangrejo, 1995

Published in Madrid in 1995, Mirror Ball: Letras turns Neil Young's Mirror Ball into a compact bilingual printed object, presenting the original English lyrics alongside Spanish translations by Isabel Ferrer.

The album itself marked one of the clearest exchanges between Young and the generation that had already absorbed him as a precursor. Recorded with Pearl Jam, Mirror Ball sits at the meeting point between Young's long-established rawness and the darker, heavier language of 1990s alternative rock.

Removed from the music and placed on the page, the songs become something else again. Repetition, blunt phrasing and fragmentary images are exposed as text, while the movement between English and Spanish gives the lyrics a second rhythm.

The design is particularly strong. The front reproduces the fractured, high-contrast imagery associated with the album, interrupted by a red LETRAS panel that reads almost like an applied sticker. On the reverse, Young's face is blown up into an enormous black-and-white fragment alongside a short Spanish text connecting him to punk, grunge and a younger generation of musicians.

Issued by Celeste Ediciones as part of the El Sueño del Cangrejo series, the book sits somewhere between lyric book, album document and inexpensive music ephemera. More than a translation, it is a bilingual publishing afterimage of Mirror Ball — the record recast as a small square paperback.

ISBN 84-8211-047-0 / 978-84-8211-047-9.