Customer Reviews

Mountain Stage Live 2

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This is one of the best Mountain Stage CD's. I agree with the other reviewer, but I want to add a little. It's too bad that you can't sample some of the best songs on this CD. Maura O'Connell's Summerfly is wonderful. My personal favorite is Kathy Mattea's Where Have You Been, it makes me cry every time I hear it! If you are not very lucky in your marriage you won't get it.

This is one of my favorite albums. If you needed a category I guess the closest thing would be "folk," but what would that tell you? The best music engages all your faculties, yes? From the dancing shoes to the sixteenth-note-follower to the grin and the tear ducts, all at once. Then it's feel-human music.

John Prine's "Big Old Goofy World." Amazing guitar picking lays the groundwork for, well, goofy, but also touching lyrics about similes: "Mind all your manners / Be quiet as a mouse / Some day you'll have a home / That's as big as a house... There's a big old goofy man / Dancin' with a big old goofy girl / Ooh, Baby! It's a big old goofy world."

"Tank Park Salute" about a man's loss of his father.

"Summerfly"--Maura O'Connell sings the great Cheryl Wheeler song. Jerry Douglas plays his mournful, sparkling, killer-groove Dobro.

"Simply"--Sara Hickman sings: "I'll tell you simply I've / Fallen for you / I've never felt this way before / I don't need flowers and /I don't mind tears..."

Jimmy Dale Gilmore sings, "These Blues ain't nuthin' like the blues I had before I paid a little debt I owed--When I get theses blues I just look back down that road."

The singers on this album approach & sometimes cross the borders of rude, sappy, and dumb. Like human beings with things to say. And boy, can some of them play.

By the way, if you're thinking of buying the album for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion", listen to the RealAudio version first. This performance of it is acoustic (which is interesting, sure), but also plodding and almost mechanical.