Last week, Olivia Rodrigo 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.
But here’s the even more startling thing about the announcement: She’s releasing … a live album? In 2025? Who does that anymore? In terms of big-league pop and rock artists, hardly anyone. But maybe it’s time for a comeback for records that lent a you-are-there listening experience and brought out aspects of a band or musician’s work you hadn’t heard in a recording studio.
You do remember live albums, right? If you’re 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’s 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’ Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! or the Who’s Live at Leeds. Soul fans probably owned James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, Otis Redding’s In Person at the Whisky a Go Go or Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace gospel foray. Metal fans swear by Deep Purple’s Made in Japan or Metallica’s Live Shit: Binge & Purge. For Southern rock, the Allman Brothers Band’s Live at Fillmore East or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s One More from the Road were must-cranks. And have we mentioned Woodstock? Or Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged?
In its heyday, which lasted a few decades, the live album served several equally valid purposes. In some cases — Cheap Trick’s At Budokan, Kiss’ Alive!, Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive!, and Bob Seger’s Live Bullet — it became the breakout moment for acts who’d been kicking around for a few years but hadn’t hit the big time. Why not gather all their best songs to date, tape ‘em 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’s 1980’s concert record, which bridged the gap between Tusk and Mirage).
This century, the live album hasn’t completely expired, but the market has been dominated by vintage material from the faults: the Grateful Dead’s ongoing barrage of rare live material, Bob Dylan box sets from various tours, and so on. Radiohead is finally getting around to releasing concert cuts, but from about 20 years ago. A few modern acts — Dua Lipa, the Weeknd, Florence + the Machine — 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.
The reasons for the collapse of the live album won’t be music to anyone’s 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’t 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 “live” album wouldn’t be all that authentic.
After 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’t be hearing note-for-note reproductions of what you’d heard on vinyl or CD, which was part of the thrill and sometimes the dismay. Led Zeppelin, 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’s music to another level on his MTV Unplugged or that orchestration would impart a new sense of opulence to Dua Lipa’s Live from the Royal Albert Hall last year?
For 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’s shows were joyfully alive, and with the help of her road band, some of her songs (“All-American Bitch,” 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.
