Music - live or studio?

V and I have had the rare (for us) opportunity to go to two concerts in the past two months. Both artists we really really like - Alicia Keys and Whiskey Myers. But our experiences were vastly different between the two. Both were, honestly, phenomenal musicians. They weren’t just average garage bands who got lucky and made it big. They have serious chops and are deeply invested in their trade.

But the highlight for Alicia (for us) was that she showed us the depth and diversity of her artistry that went beyond what we know from her recordings. Her personality was a positive factor as well. She loved the audience, interacted with people who were shouting adoration to her from the crowd. She came across as so much more than her musical (and acting) library of work.

Whiskey Myers is also a band we absolutely love to listen to. Cody Cannon’s voice is that perfect balance of coarse and control wrapped up in passion. But throughout their show, each song became a bit of dueling lead guitar solos with John Jeffers and Cody Tate each displaying their incredible mastery of what Jack Black would call face-melting guitar solos. The first song… and maybe the second to showcase these two hard rocking southern good-ole-boys was everything a great guitar solo should be: unexpected, brilliant, inspirational, and full of genuine amazement. But after that, the rest of the entire concert started to feel like 2.5 hours of Free Bird: eventually it became mind-numbing and boring (with all due apology to these musicians I absolutely am a fan of!).

But here’s the beauty of our experiences: Live music has its own flavor and interpretation of the music we know from the recordings. Sometimes, a live performance makes you appreciate what more the artist has yet to reveal about themselves; other times it makes you appreciate their hard artistic choices to make a record brilliant.

The great thing about curating playlists is that I get to dabble in a lot of artists’ libraries of work. Sometimes you can just tell there is more there than could be laid down in a studio, and other times, you know the hard effort made in their studio work made their best a little better.