The best live albums are the ones that veer off from note-perfect re-creations of an artist’s studio work. They’re the ones that free the songs from the technological miasma of the recording console and give listeners a truer picture of a musician’s talent. They are albums such as the Who’s “Live at Leeds” or Johnny Cash’s “At Folsom Prison”–records that document performers at their very best.
They are also records such as “Stone, Steel & Bright Lights,” the first live album from Jay Farrar. It differs from live albums by the Who and Cash in that Farrar culled the 19 tracks from a handful of different live performances instead of one. The result is the same: a recording that presents the singer’s music as a dynamic, vital force in a way that his studio albums haven’t always communicated.
“The primary reason for doing this is to try to capture the energy that occurs when you’re playing music in front of a live audience, and it’s kind of hard to do that in the studio or any other way than a live performance,” Farrar says from his home in St. Louis.
The other reason is one of history: After 15 years of touring, the founder of Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt felt it was finally time to put out a live album.
“The idea of doing a live record was always an appealing idea, but now I basically have the means to go put it out without any dissent,” says Farrar, who released the album June 8 on his own Transmit Sound label. “It would have been a harder sell on a major label, I think, to get it approved.”
“Stone, Steel & Bright Lights” mostly comprises songs from Farrar’s solo albums, which he had never played live with a full band before hitting the road last year with Canyon, an Americana band from Washington, D.C. Farrar and his adopted five-piece band didn’t merely spit out rote versions of what is on his CDs, either.
“When Canyon and I got together, I pretty much told them I wanted to reinterpret the songs and for them to bring as much of their style and sensibility to it, and to a large extent, they did,” Farrar says. “It was good working with Canyon because they had their own pre-existing dynamic.”
He and the band reimagine “Voodoo Candle” as a big-sky ballad, while “Fool King’s Crowd” takes on more urgency than the version on last year’s album, “Terroir Blues.”
Along with two previously unreleased songs, Farrar also includes a pair of covers: “Hurricane” by Neil Young and “Lucifer Sam,” a Syd Barrett tune from Pink Floyd’s 1967 debut.
“I had known that song for quite a while,” Farrar says. “[I] did it briefly with Uncle Tupelo but wanted to give it a resurrection with Canyon. We had more of the right instrumentation.”
And not just on “Lucifer Sam”–the musical chemistry between Farrar and Canyon makes “Stone, Steel & Bright Lights” his best album since Son Volt’s “Trace” in 1995.
