It isn't a particularly hot take to say that there's something special about live music compared to studio recordings. Sure, studio production comes with a lot more tricks and gadgets that let producers and artists tweak every little detail until it's perfect, often in ways that can't be replicated live - that's even part of why the Beatles stopped performing live for a while - but on the flip side, live shows hum and crackle with a vibrant energy that comes from being present in that moment.

It's interesting, then, that live albums can be such a polarizing subject among music fans. I've even flip-flopped my opinion about them several times over the years. Some folks think hearing all the crowd noise in the background is obnoxious, while some love the thrill that comes with hearing hundreds or thousands of voices raised in joy.

Most live performances aren't perfect; even the greatest musicians make mistakes sometimes. But in my opinion, as a musician and chronic concert-goer, that just contributes to the magic of great live music performances. There are no second takes, no pitch correction, no AutoTune (although that last one is becoming more feasible as a live effect, but that's another conversation entirely). So, here's a selection of live albums that come delightfully close to capturing the ineffable energy of a live performance.

12 Metallica – S&M

Recorded On April 21 & 22, 1999

The 1990s were an odd time for Metallica. Their first '90s album (self-titled, but generally referred to as The Black Album) became one of the best-selling metal albums of all time, but its follow-ups - 1996's Load and 1997's Reload - saw similar commercial success along with an increase in criticism that the band had abandoned its thrash metal origins in favor of a more marketable sound. In other words, in the eyes of the metal scene, Metallica had sold out.

The decision to follow Load and Reload up by recording a concert with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra may have seemed like a strange one, yet the idea actually had roots deep in the band's history. Original bassist Cliff Burton was a huge proponent of combining heavy metal with classical, even to the point of incorporating motifs inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach into the arrangements of songs on Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets. Drummer Lars Ulrich was also ive of the idea, citing his own favorite band, Deep Purple's, 1969 live album Concerto for Group and Orchestra.

The result was the cleverly named S&M, a two-night performance at the storied Berkeley Community Theatre, released as both a double album and a full concert film. For all the criticism Metallica had received over the '90s that they had lost their edge, S&M showed that there was still a sharpness to the band, as they played classics like "For Whom the Bell Tolls" alongside newer tracks like "Until it Sleeps." The album is two hours and change of relentless, driven orchestral metal, and proved that the band still had some of their old steel in their spines.

11 Florence + The Machine – MTV Presents Unplugged: Florence + The Machine

Recorded On December 15, 2011

MTV Unplugged may feel like an intrinsically '90s thing to those of us who still associate it with bands like Nirvana, but the network has actually continued recording and airing Unplugged specials into the modern era, featuring an ever-wider variety of bands. English indie-rockers Florence + The Machine got their shot at an Unplugged special in late 2011, when they recorded a set at New York's Angel Orensanz Center - the city's oldest standing synagogue - ed by a ten-voice gospel choir.

While critics at the time were unkind to the stripped-down arrangements, with tracks like "Drumming Song" and "Cosmic Love" said to have lost some of the unique sound that came from their studio production, Florence + The Machine's MTV Unplugged set has aged like fine wine. The unique combination of the synagogue's acoustics, the gospel-style backing vocals, and the surprise appearance of Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme singing a duet with Florence Welch all come together to a beautiful crescendo, building off the arrangements the band had used for their 2009 Royal Albert Hall concert brilliantly.

10 Warren Zevon – Stand in the Fire

Recorded In August 1980

Two decades after classic rock's eternal bridesmaid Warren Zevon ed away from mesothelioma, his friend and colleague David Letterman said this about a conversation he'd had with Zevon about his live album from 1980, Stand in the Fire (Vulture):

I'm explaining to him how I thought one of the greatest live-concert records ever made was his Stand in the Fire album recorded at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip … I was fomenting about how much I love the energy of this album … It's electric, it's vibrant, it’s exciting, it's Warren hopping up and down, and he's just fantastic. And I asked, "What are your memories of that, Warren, when you recorded that?" And he responded, "I have no memory of that show at all." And I thought, Yeah, okay.

Given that 1980 was the first of Zevon's many attempts at sobriety, and given just how intense his performance is on Stand in the Fire - Letterman is, if anything, understating just how wild the album is - it's no surprise that the rocker's own impression of the album was a fleeting one. Then again, Zevon's response could have been fueled by legendarily acerbic wit, and he was just as likely giving Letterman a hard time.

Either way, Stand in the Fire shows Zevon at his most frenzied, although his stage banter also shows he was deeply aware of just how close he'd come to being another of the countless forgotten rockers who failed to leave a mark on Los Angeles. That macabre self-awareness was something that defined all of Zevon's work, but while his later live album Learning to Flinch showed him in his more melancholy, acoustic phase, Stand in the Fire is nonstop classic rock in the best, most manic way.

9 Frank Turner – Show 2000: Live At Nottingham Rock City

Recorded On December 15, 2016

On "The Road," a song from his album Poetry of the Deed, Frank Turner sings of performing gigs by the thousands, although when that album was released in September 2009, he was only at around 680 or so. In fact, the first time I saw him live - completely by accident, he just happened to be opening for Murder By Death at a bar in San Luis Obispo that I drove five hours to get to - was his 692nd solo live show.

As of this article's writing, Frank Turner has performed 3,036 live shows in 52 countries, including every US state and Canadian province. He also set the record for the most gigs performed in 24 hours back in 2024, with 15 shows in different towns and cities across the UK.

Frank's 2000th live show was seven years later, at the famous Rock City nightclub in Nottingham. While it doesn't quite have some of the acoustic grandeur of some of his other live albums, like 2012's Live from Wembley (show 1216, for those keeping track), there's a gravitas to Show 2000 that comes with it celebrating such an incredible milestone. There's no denying that Frank Turner has consistently been one of the hardest-working people in rock and roll - and if recent releases are any indication, he's still clearly going strong.

8 Will Wood – IN CASE I DIE:

Recorded Between April 21 & October 9, 2022

When he announced IN CASE I DIE:, Will Wood clearly intended it to be the end of his musical career. In a blog post on V13, posted just a week before the album's release, he explained his reasons for his hiatus/retirement/disappearing act:

I gotta stop baring my soul long enough to put it back together, for lack of less dramatic phrasing. Explore life away from and possibly kill off "singer-songwriter Will Wood." My last words, in case I die. … I need to go and figure out who I am without all of that stuff. Without the confusion, the distortion of my self-image, and who I've thought I have to be for so many years. I may find that I'm healthier and happier, and that there's another life out there for me that I was always meant to live. I'll probably be back at some point. Just depends on how you define "I" and "back."

It's a beautifully honest ission of the difficulty he's had over the past few years, as vulnerable as anything on IN CASE I DIE:, which flies in the face of Wood's tendency towards bombastic, gonzo arrangements and instead presents itself as mostly solo piano or even ukulele arrangements - raw, tender, intimate, with just a touch of his usual frenzy.

The hiatus may be over; 2024 saw the release of The New Normal!, a remix of Wood's 2020 The Normal Album, and earlier this year Wood announced the Mr. Wood is Dead Ten-Year Anniversary Tour, which will last from mid-May until the beginning of September. Personally, I'm glad to see that Wood is feeling better enough about his mental health to be back on tour already. If a new live album comes out of the tour, even better, but either way, IN CASE I DIE: makes for a beautiful punctuation mark for Wood's career.

7 Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats – Live At Red Rocks

Recorded On August 21, 2016

Nathaniel Rateliff's Live at Red Rocks - not to be confused with Red Rocks 2020, recorded at the same venue just three years later - is a jaw-dropping hour of power, as Rateliff and his backing band, the Night Sweats, blow the metaphorical roof off of Colorado's most legendary 10,000-seat amphitheatre. Between the band's energy and the massive, roaring crowd, Live at Red Rocks shows just how wild a concert can be compared to a studio recording.

6 Dessa – Sound The Bells: Recorded Live At Orchestra Hall

Recorded On March 26 & 28, 2019

Best known for her work with the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based indie rap collective Doomtree, Dessa has also had a series of truly incredible and inspired solo releases. 2019 saw her take a whole new spin on her body of work. Working with sometime collaborator Andy Thompson - a professional arranger who has also worked with the likes of Taylor Swift - Dessa took some of her best-known tracks and transformed them into full orchestral arrangements, which were performed with the Grammy-winning Minnesota Orchestra.

Dessa described the process of orchestrating her work as a truly transformative one. In an interview with Analogue Music's Mat Connor she said, "The song really is obliterated and then resurrected again to make use of the orchestra's power. It's not just adding strings. It's incinerating and rebuilding fresh from ash and light and violence." That theme of rebirth is a common one in her work, and is on full display on Sound the Bells.

5 Talking Heads – Stop Making Sense

Recorded Between December 13 & 16, 1983

Stop Making Sense has been a classic since it was released in 1984, and has set the gold standard for every concert film since. While the original pressing of the film's companion album only contained half of the songs from the film, leaving off some of the Talking Heads' more esoteric tracks like "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)," a special edition matching the tracklist of the full film was released for the film's 15th anniversary in 1999.

While many of the finer details of Stop Making Sense exist only in the film - the lighting, the intimate cinematography, and David Byrne's big suit - the soundscape is still just as engaging and powerful, even without the visuals. The film itself was remastered and rereleased in 4K by indie studio A24 in 2023, but even if you can't get a hold of a high-def video copy, the album is still just as engrossing as it's always been; in other words, Stop Making Sense is the same as it ever was.

4 Jimi Hendrix – Live at Woodstock

Recorded On August 18, 1969

The original Woodstock Festival was the culmination of everything amazing about the 1960s. The lineup was a who's who of the greats of the time - The Who, Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie, Santana, the Grateful Dead - who spent three days on a rainy, muddy farm in upstate New York, playing their hearts out to a peak attendance of almost half a million extremely stoned and grimy people.

Jimi Hendrix, the man who made wah-wah pedals into an art form, had the distinguished honor of closing out Woodstock as the festival's final performer. At 8:30 AM on Monday, August 18, 1969, he and his new backing group, the short-lived Band of Gypsies, played a two-plus-hour set to the dwindling crowd. It was here that Hendrix performed the face-melting version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that became one of his most well-known political statements; the rest of his set was equally brilliant.

Initially released in a heavily edited-for-time form just titled Woodstock, Hendrix's set was later remastered and released in a more complete form in 1999 as Live at Woodstock. While still not a complete recording of the set, this is about as close as it's possible to get to that original, unedited, beautifully psychedelic performance, barring the invention of time travel (or a really profound acid trip).

3 Miles Davis – The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel 1965

Recorded On December 22 & 23, 1965

While rock and roll and its infinite derivatives may still be the most accessible source of live albums, for those who love live music's ability to provide infinite, nuanced permutations of songs, there's nothing that rivals jazz. That goes double when it comes to the work of Miles Davis, possibly one of the most talented people to ever pick up a trumpet.

The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel is a box set expanding on an earlier, shorter cut of the sessions recorded at Chicago's Plugged Nickel nightclub in 1965. Those sets were some of the first Davis played after a hiatus earlier that year, taken due to his need to recover from complicated hip replacement surgery, and there's a frenzied nature to Davis' playing that likely comes from the frustrations he'd felt at spending so long in recovery.

Unbeknownst to Davis, his backing band had conspired to take a unique approach to their sets at the Plugged Nickel - something drummer Tony Williams called "anti-music," where each musician would intentionally make improvisational choices that were the opposite of what anyone would expect in order to break the whole band out of their comfort zones. It worked phenomenally; there's true brilliance on display as Davis and the rest of the quintet rose to the challenge. As Herbie Hancock, Davis' pianist at the time, recounted in his memoir Possibilities:

[Miles] never said a word about it. He knew better than anyone that something strange was going on, but he never asked us, and we never told him. He just went with it. And he was brilliant! … There was so much going on … I really liked it, but I'm not even sure I could explain why. I would call it profound, except that the word 'profound,' to me, implies something that's deep and elegant. This was not elegant. This was naked and had guts. It was raw. To this day, when I hear recordings from the Plugged Nickel, I'm knocked out by their sheer raw intensity and honesty.