{"id":21565,"date":"2025-09-14T09:09:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T09:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/21565\/"},"modified":"2025-09-14T09:09:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T09:09:10","slug":"can-olivia-rodrigo-save-the-live-album","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/21565\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Olivia Rodrigo Save the Live Album?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLast week, Olivia Rodrigo<\/a> made a surprise announcement about her follow-up to Guts. But instead of another record of new material, Live at Glastonbury (A BBC Recording), to be released in December, will document her entire set at that festival this summer, complete with a cameo by the Robert Smith on covers of two Cure songs.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut here\u2019s the even more startling thing about the announcement: She\u2019s releasing \u2026 a live album? In 2025? Who does that anymore? In terms of big-league pop and rock artists, hardly anyone. But maybe it\u2019s time for a comeback for records that lent a you-are-there listening experience and brought out aspects of a band or musician\u2019s work you hadn\u2019t heard in a recording studio. <\/p>\n

\n\tYou do remember live albums, right? If you\u2019re on a certain generation, you may not, since not even Taylor Swift, very attuned to revenue streams, released a full concert album from the Eras Tour. Billie Eilish<\/a>\u2019s unplugged Live at Third Man Records, back in 2019, was a limited-edition vinyl release, which instantly designated it an underground item. But for decades, the concert LP was a staple of zillions of music-addicted households. No matter what genre you followed, one of them was surely in your record collection. Classic-rock buffs surely had copies of the Rolling Stones<\/a>\u2019 Get Yer Ya-Ya\u2019s Out! or the Who<\/a>\u2019s Live at Leeds. Soul fans probably owned James Brown<\/a>\u2019s Live at the Apollo, Otis Redding<\/a>\u2019s In Person at the Whisky a Go Go or Aretha Franklin<\/a>\u2019s Amazing Grace gospel foray. Metal fans swear by Deep Purple\u2019s Made in Japan or Metallica\u2019s Live Shit: Binge & Purge. For Southern rock, the Allman Brothers Band\u2019s Live at Fillmore East or Lynyrd Skynyrd\u2019s One More from the Road were must-cranks. And have we mentioned Woodstock? Or Nirvana\u2019s MTV Unplugged? <\/p>\n

\n\tIn its heyday, which lasted a few decades, the live album served several equally valid purposes. In some cases \u2014 Cheap Trick<\/a>\u2019s At Budokan, Kiss<\/a>\u2019 Alive!, Peter Frampton<\/a>\u2019s Frampton Comes Alive!, and Bob Seger<\/a>\u2019s Live Bullet \u2014 it became the breakout moment for acts who\u2019d been kicking around for a few years but hadn\u2019t hit the big time. Why not gather all their best songs to date, tape \u2018em in front of an excited fanbase, and give em another shot? Live records could also be a way of fulfilling a contractual obligation (too many examples to cite) or a way to mollify fans who were going to have to wait a while for another studio record (Fleetwood Mac\u2019s 1980\u2019s concert record, which bridged the gap between Tusk and Mirage).<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tThis century, the live album hasn\u2019t completely expired, but the market has been dominated by vintage material from the faults: the Grateful Dead<\/a>\u2019s ongoing barrage of rare live material, Bob Dylan box sets from various tours, and so on. Radiohead<\/a> is finally getting around to releasing concert cuts, but from about 20 years ago. A few modern acts \u2014 Dua Lipa<\/a>, the Weeknd<\/a>, Florence + the Machine \u2014 have rolled out concert records in the last few years. But for all the firepower of their names, none has made the same impact as the classic concert albums of the past. Those records are now asides and ephemera, not events.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe reasons for the collapse of the live album won\u2019t be music to anyone\u2019s ears. Thanks to YouTube (where you can watch or listen to entire shows for free) or sites that allow you to stream or download shows, maybe fans don\u2019t feel they need to shell out dollars for an official release. If we want to be deeply cynical for a moment, perhaps some of them suspect that a certain amount of pre-recorded vocals or instruments are a normal part of the concert experience and assume that a \u201clive\u201d album wouldn\u2019t be all that authentic. <\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter all, part of the appeal of the concert albums of yore was hearing what singers or bands would sound like outside the controlled confines of a recording studio. You knew you wouldn\u2019t be hearing note-for-note reproductions of what you\u2019d heard on vinyl or CD, which was part of the thrill and sometimes the dismay. Led Zeppelin<\/a>, so volcanic on record, came off as disappointingly scraggly on The Song Remains the Same. Dylan & The Dead seemed to bring out the worst in both. (Search out the rehearsal tapes instead.) But who knew that the Roots would take Jay-Z\u2019s music to another level on his MTV Unplugged or that orchestration would impart a new sense of opulence to Dua Lipa\u2019s Live from the Royal Albert Hall last year? <\/p>\n

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\n\tFor Dua Lipa and now Rodrigo, concert records are a logical extension of their place in the pop firmament. Acts like them, after all, are the ones headlining arenas and festivals the way rock bands once did when they were in their primes. As many of us saw last year on her Guts tour, Rodrigo\u2019s shows were joyfully alive, and with the help of her road band, some of her songs (\u201cAll-American Bitch,\u201d for one) sported a spikier, looser energy than the studio versions. Will that translate to her Glastonbury performance heard only in audio? Too soon to tell, but give her props for wading into the concert album waters. After too long a decline, someone needs to make the storied, necessary art of the live album alive again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, Olivia Rodrigo made a surprise announcement about her follow-up to Guts. But instead of another record…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[22607,10289,22608,22609,11638,156,22610,22611,22612,22613,19727,15132,157,111,139,69,3875,22614,22615,4923,22616,22617,22618,22619],"class_list":{"0":"post-21565","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-aretha-franklin","9":"tag-billie-eilish","10":"tag-bob-seger","11":"tag-cheap-trick","12":"tag-dua-lipa","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-florence-and-the-machine","15":"tag-grateful-dead","16":"tag-james-brown","17":"tag-jay-z","18":"tag-kiss","19":"tag-led-zeppelin","20":"tag-music","21":"tag-new-zealand","22":"tag-newzealand","23":"tag-nz","24":"tag-olivia-rodrigo","25":"tag-otis-redding","26":"tag-peter-frampton","27":"tag-radiohead","28":"tag-rolling-stones","29":"tag-taylor-swfit","30":"tag-the-weeknd","31":"tag-the-who"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}