Every genre of music has different expectations for what a live album should be. In jazz, for instance, it's almost taken for granted that a jazz album is recorded live, even if it's live from a studio. The ethos of jazz includes the expectation that jazz should be recorded with all the musicians in the same room, playing all at once, and that room should ideally be a jazz club with an audience. Even if it's not recorded in that setting, jazz albums are still expected to sound like they could have been recorded like that. Even in jazz studio albums, there is an expectation that there will be a live feel. On the other side of the spectrum, pop live albums have no such genre-wide mandates. A live album by a pop artist might include extensive post production editing including overdubs, autotune, and the concert the album was recorded at could have been entirely pre-recorded anyways. It's entirely possible to imagine a live album from a modern pop artist where no musicians were playing live, and the vocalist's performance was so heavily edited it couldn't qualify as live anymore either. And that's not to say that doesn't happen in other genres, but pop music doesn't try to hide it like jazz does.
John Mayer's live albums, and this one in particular, tend much closer to the jazz side of this spectrum than the pop side, at least when it comes to the live feel. Listening to Where the Light Is, you can't deny that it feels live. The album was recorded in a theater, and it sounds like it. I wasn't at the venue when it was recorded, but I find it hard to imagine much was lost in translation. Well, except for the two cut songs. There is that to be aware of. Because despite the audible crowd interaction and the perfectly imperfect live vocals, this album is still heavily polished- but not too heavily polished. The vocals sound like they were recorded on a typical live vocal mic, not a studio microphone, and you can hear that Mayer's distance to the microphone isn't consistent. The mixing engineers probably worked hard to get it to sound as good as it does, but it still sounds like a guy singing into an SM58 at a concert- a sound I'm well acquainted with, and a sound that sells the live feel to me in a subtle but powerful way.
Okay I'm three paragraphs in, I should probably start talking about the music. Where the Light Is comes in the form of a 2-CD double album, where the first disc is split between an acoustic set and the John Mayer Trio. The second disc is full rock band. Each of these sets has a mix of memorable John Mayer hits, deeper cuts, and a cover or two. The acoustic set tends towards older material, the trio set obviously draws heavily on the John Mayer Trio's album Try!, and the band set focuses on mostly material from John Mayer's latest album at the time, Continuum. I love the track listing here. There's a little bit of everything, and every John Mayer song is developed just a little bit more than it was when it was first released. There are extended solos, altered lyrics, brand new intros and outros, and all the other little things that make me love listening to live recordings. As a John Mayer fan, these are songs that I know, played in a new way.
John Mayer's blues and rock roots are even more evident on his live albums than they are on his more pop-friendly studio releases. At the same time, I'm impressed at how well his songs translate over to a live context. The arrangements are largely the same as the original songs (with the exception of the acoustic set), but the band feels looser, like they're playing together and playing off each other more. It's not as sanitized as the studio albums are. It's not even like the studio albums are that sanitized or sterile, but there's just that extra 10% edge on the sound when it's done live. You can hear the chemistry between band members and if that doesn't make a live album worth listening to, I don't know what does.
As with Unreal Unearth, the last album I reviewed, Where the Light Is is an album that benefits from a full listen through rather than just picking out individual songs. Unreal Unearth is greater than the sum of its parts because it is a concept album, but Where the Light Is is stronger than any individual song because live albums are all about mentally putting yourself in the room where it happened. It's about imagining that it's December 2007 and you're in Los Angeles and you don't know what's going to happen next. Even if you do know, you have to pretend you don't.
I found this album at a record store in a trendy side of town that I didn't know existed until I walked past it one day. I stopped in, and found this album. I listened to it on the drive home, and it quickly became one of my favorite live albums. I listened to the band set while driving, with the stereo turned up as loud as I could stand, and listened to disc one at home through my my nice headphones to get all of the nuance of the more intimate sets. Since then, I've listened to the whole thing straight through, I've listened to just disc two with the band set, and I've had it in my shuffle rotation when I want to listen to John Mayer and I don't really care what songs come on. In all those contexts, this album makes me instantly happy as soon as it starts, because I know that it will suck me in quickly.
As I'm writing this, the last song of the album, "I'm Gonna Find Another You", just came on, and I know my time listening is almost up. Normally when I write these reviews, I listen to the album on repeat while I write, proofread, and re-write. While this album is plenty long (two hours and four minutes!), I know I can't let it repeat back to the beginning. My listening ends here, because the show is over. Maybe I'll edit this review while listening to a different John Mayer live album I have. But that's just the power of the live album- it draws you in, and asks you to play by its rules. Who am I to say no?
My favorite song from Where the Light Is is "I Don't Need No Doctor", a Ray Charles cover that caught my ear because it's one of the few songs I didn't already know when I first listened to this album. I love a good blues, and I love that it's the only song with presumably improvised solos for both the trumpet player and the saxophone player. As a jazz saxophonist myself, I really enjoyed that. I have no choice but to rate this album five stars.
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