Rating: 4/5
Review:
A good, if not great, live album
This is a recording of a broadcast from 1981 of a concert by James Taylor and his band on the Dad Loves His Work tour. It is a good live album in many ways although to me it doesn't quite capture what I think is really special about James Taylor's music and performances.
The set list is very familiar to long standing Taylor fans (like me), with a sprinkling of Greatest Hits like Fire and Rain and You've Got A Friend, and solid album tracks. J.D. Souther joins him for Her Town Too, which works very well live, and there's plenty of good singing and guitar from Taylor throughout, with fine work from the band on every track. The recording and remastering is excellent and the engineers tread a good line by capturing the excitement of a live show while not overdoing the crowd noise at the expense of the music. As a record of a very good performance it's excellent.
My reservations are purely personal. This is a pretty rocky, heavily band-orientated performance throughout. That's fine in a way, but what makes James Taylor such a fine artist for me is the brilliance of his acoustic guitar work and the lovely tone and sensitivity of his singing voice. Neither is strongly in evidence here and while it's a very professional and musically high-quality performance, it just doesn't really shine or stand out from the crowd of such live shows in the way that some of his later solo acoustic performances have.
I do like the album in spite of this, and you may well not share my taste or reservations and love it. Any James Taylor fan will want this and will enjoy it; it's just not one of his greatest, in my view.
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