The magic of live music

Listening and watching the excellent Live At The Royal Albert Hall album of The Killers has gotten me interested in live recordings again. I still remember the first one I ever heard ages ago. No videos yet during that time. It was Anka At The Copa by Paul Anka and I found it truly amazing.

I loved the interaction with the audience, the brisk pacing and Anka’s warm and very casual way with the songs that were mostly his hits and standards. I also thought the LP, no CDs or tapes yet at that time, was a good measure of his success as a star. It was proof that Anka had graduated from teen idol to billed performer at the Copacabana where the likes of Sinatra did shows. And I knew then that only the truly big stars deserve to do a live album.

Fast forward to today. Thanks to hits like I’m Yours and Lucky with Colbie Caillat, Jason Mraz was also able to make that transition from pop idol to big star. And he now has his very own live album. In fact, he has already released two live sets. The first one on DVD was the semi-documentary Tonight Not Again.

The latest is titled Beautiful Mess — Live On Earth which is not only technically the superior product. It has a better song line-up and puts emphasis on how much Jason has grown as a performer and how his innate appeal to the public seems to have multiplied several times over alongside his success.

 The two-disc album was recorded during a performance at the Gratitude Café Tour at the Charter One Pavillion in Chicago last August. As usual, it is made up of hits, mostly from his We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things album. Jason does these well and his vocals here sound even better than in the studio versions. He has a great band and the arrangements, a lot of them new and different, just for the show, present a charming set.

Web-discovery Colbie Caillat guests to perform their big duet Lucky. There are also added features like the short films We Sing, We Dance, We Make Videos and Un Beau Desordre. The big thing in the show though is really just Jason, whose full, confident vocals and crowd-pleasing repertoire guarantees good entertainment. We should have this guy over to do the Big Dome soon.

The Disc One CD has Sunshine Song, Traveler, Make It Mine, Anything You Want, Coyotes, Live High, Only Human, The Remedy, The Dynamo Of Volition, A Beautiful Mess, I’m Yours, Lucky feat. Colbie, Copchase, All Night Long, Butterfly and The Boy’s Gone. The Disc Two DVD has all of those plus Fall Through Glass and the added features.

Linkin Park should take a look at The Killers’ Live At The Royal Albert Hall album release and then hire the director behind that long-form video. His help would be most welcome so as not to repeat the mistakes in the band’s Road To Revolution Live At Milton Keynes recording from the 2008 Projekt Revolution Tour of England.

But maybe they were not really that keen on making a film for the DVD disc in the album. Napilitan lang. Or maybe they just want the visuals raw and the last thing they want was to be cute on stage. Rock band naman sila. Now if what they were really after was filmed footage of them facing that mammoth crowd of 65,000 people in England just dishing out their songs, then they succeeded.

The song line-up is very impressive. They simply go from one hit to another as though to tell the viewers that Linkin Park is truly one of the biggest bands in the world today. So big in fact that Jay-Z, who is also a big guy in the realm of hip-hop, even came along to join them in the Numb encore plus Jigga What and Faint.

 The CD and DVD both have the same set list that includes One Step Closer, From The Inside, No More Sorrow, Given Up, Lying From You, Hands Held High, Leave Out All The Rest, Numb, The Little Things Give You Away, Breaking The Habit, Shadow Of The Day, Crawling, In The End, Pushing Me Away, What I’ve Done, and Bleed It Out.