Richard Thompson - Hand of Kindness and Across a Crowded Room - Acoustic Version (1983-1985)

I promised to post a lot more Richard Thompson soon, so here's a bit more from him.

I recently posted an acoustic Richard-only version of the classic Richard and Thompson 1982 album "Shoot Out the Lights." I'm going to continue to post more all-acoustic albums like that if I can. But the problem is, his first two solo albums of all new material, "Hand of Kindness" and "Across a Crowded Room" have a lot of rocking songs that he's never performed acoustically (or he's never played in concert at all). So I've combined the two, making one album of ideal album length, 46 minutes.

Luckily, Thompson is popular enough to have been bootlegged a lot, with a surprising number of quality soundboards. So that means the sound quality here is generally excellent. As I often do, I've removed audience noise to make it sound like he's playing acoustic guitar in your living room.

I got especially lucky with "Across a Crowded Room." There are very few Thompson studio bootlegs at all. But there is one containing many of the songs from that album being done as acoustic demos, and in excellent sound. That enabled me to find acoustic versions of some songs that he's never done acoustically in concert. (Unfortunately, it's a short bootleg and doesn't cover all the songs from that album.)

As with all albums in this series, I'm ordering all the songs in the same order as on the original albums.  Since this covers two albums, the first five songs are from "Hand of Kindness" and the remaining eight are from "Across a Crowded Room."

Since Thompson was in a particularly rocking mode during this phase of his career, I think it's especially interesting to hear these songs done acoustically. Also, he only played the stronger songs in concert at all, so this is kind of a "best of" collection as well.

By the way, not all the songs here are from the same years these albums were released. Sometimes, I had to widen my search to get a good acoustic version. But I usually came fairly close. The versions here date from 1982 to 1991.

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 Tear-Stained Letter (Richard Thompson)
02 How I Wanted To (Richard Thompson)
03 Hand of Kindness (Richard Thompson)
04 Devonside (Richard Thompson)
05 Two Left Feet (Richard Thompson)
06 When the Spell Is Broken (Richard Thompson)
07 I Ain't Going to Drag My Feet No More (Richard Thompson)
08 Shine On Love (Richard Thompson)
09 Ghosts in the Wind (Richard Thompson)
10 Fire in the Engine Room (Richard Thompson)
11 Walking through a Wasted Land (Richard Thompson)
12 She Twists the Knife Again (Richard Thompson)
13 Love in a Faithless Country (Richard Thompson)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15268194/RichrdT_1983-1985_HndofKindnessAcrssCrowdedRoomAcoustc_atse.zip.html

I took the photo for the cover art from the Watching the Dark box set art work. The top of his head is cut off in the original, so I couldn't do anything about that.