10 songs

As much time as country artists spend out on the road--200 or more nights a year in most cases--you'd think they'd release a lot more live albums. Yet the whole idea of concert recordings seems to scare the pants off the control freaks at Nashville's record companies. Fortunately, a handful of country acts have dispensed with the conventional wisdom and released terrific live discs. Tracy Lawrence's --Live is a fine example of what can happen when you put an exciting singer in front of an excitable audience. At the baby-cheeked age of 27 and after just three studio albums, Lawrence has already racked up enough number-one and top-10 singles to justify a greatest-hits package. Instead of simply recycling those singles, he decided to rerecord them as a live album. The usual approach to making a live album is to pick one particular concert at random, tape the show and accept the results, good or bad. Instead, Lawrence built a portable studio in his tour bus, recording every show and having his musicians listen to the tapes so they could hear what was working and what wasn't. As a result, the band, nicknamed Little Elvis, refined the arrangements and eliminated the extra fuss and clutter which are the biggest sins of live music. The 10 songs on "Live" are taken from several concerts at the end of that process, and they boast a no-frills approach which allows the band to push Lawrence hard without getting in his way.--Geoffrey Himes