Above is the only studio album by the American rock band Mad Season, released on March 14, 1995, through Columbia Records. Above peaked at No. 24 on the Billboard 200 chart. The album has been certified gold by the RIAA in the United States. Layne Staley created the artwork on the album cover and inside the inlay. Background During the production of Pearl Jam's Vitalogy, guitarist Mike McCready went into rehabilitation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he met John Baker Saunders, who would a short while later become bassist in The Walkabouts. In 1994, when the two returned to Seattle, they formed a side band with Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin. Immediately the trio set up rehearsal time together and began writing material. McCready then brought in friend and Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley to round out the line-up. McCready had hoped that being around sober musicians would push Staley to get himself sober. Recording The album was recorded in 1994 at Bad Animals Studio in Seattle, Washington. The band worked with producer Brett Eliason, who had previously worked with McCready as Pearl Jam's sound engineer. The album was mixed by Eliason. The music for the songs "Wake Up" and "River of Deceit" came out of rehearsals that the group had before Staley joined. The song "Artificial Red" came together at a show that the band had at the Crocodile Cafe in October 1994. The songs "Lifeless Dead" and "I Don't Know Anything" were first premiered on Pearl Jam's January 8, 1995 Self-Pollution satellite radio broadcast, a four-and-a-half-hour-long pirate broadcast out of Seattle which was available to any radio stations that wanted to carry it. McCready said, "We did all the Mad Season music in about seven days. It took Layne just a few more days to finish his vocals, which was intense since we only rehearsed twice and did four shows. So this has been the most spontaneous thing I've ever been involved in. This was done even quicker than Temple of the Dog which took about four weeks... With Mad Season we just went in and started jamming on tunes and everybody had ideas and it just happened with three or four days." McCready said, "I told [Staley]... 'You do what you want, you write all the songs and lyrics. You're the singer.' He'd come in, and he'd do these beautiful songs." During the making of the album,