Live’s not dead: 21 great live albums from the 21st century

In May 1968, Johnny Cash released Live At Folsom Prison, a recording of a raucous, emotionally charged performance before a group of grateful inmates that went on to top the country charts, completely reinvigorating Cash’s career. Folsom wasn’t the first successful live album, obviously, but it quickly became a paragon of its potential. In its wake, it seemed, every major artist felt compelled to release one, creating a ’70s heyday for the live album in which several classics rivaled or even surpassed studio efforts: The Who’s Live At Leeds. Cheap Trick At Budokan. Jimi Hendrix’s Band Of Gypsys. Frampton Comes Alive! And so on.

Despite some sporadic hits from the likes of U2, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana, and Garth Brooks, the live album gradually fell out of favor as the ’80s and ’90s wore on, viewed increasingly as the self-indulgence of rock dinosaurs. (“Does everyone remember the Foghat rule? Your fourth album should be double live,” Bob Odenkirk joked in Yo La Tengo’s video for “Sugarcube,” fairly summing up the indie attitude.) But while there haven’t been as many universally regarded live albums in the 2000s—in an age that has also largely devalued the “album” itself—it’s still given us plenty of worthwhile examples. Here are some of them.

2. Kate Bush, Before The Dawn (2016)

Although Kate Bush’s music is, in many ways, made for the stage, she famously stopped performing live after 1979’s epic, innovative Tour Of Life and spent the ensuing decades making music strictly in the studio. Thirty-five years passed before her son, Bertie, convinced her to mount the live residency Before The Dawn, at the very theater where her final concert tour ended, London’s Hammersmith Apollo. The show merged storylines from two albums made 20 years apart: the near-death experience of “The Ninth Wave,” from Bush’s 1986 landmark album Hounds Of Love, and the life-affirming day passed in “(An Endless) Sky Of Honey,” from 2005’s Aerial. The audio recording of not only offers fresh versions of some of Bush’s best songs—most of them never performed live before—but it also reframes and expands them with new narrative elements and connections to Bush’s oeuvre. It cuts an illuminating new path through her catalog. [Kelsey J. Waite]