Keb Mo - Home Concert, Franklin, TN, 4-4-2020

We can all agree that the coronavirus pandemic is a terrible thing. But it does have one nice silver lining in that lots of musicians are streaming concerts from their homes. A couple of days ago, I posted a home concert from Richard Thompson. Here's another one from Keb Mo. I hope I'll have more concerts like these to post in the near future.

As I mentioned with the Thompson post, if you kind out about home concerts such as these from talented artists, please let me know, because they're easy to miss. Today, I was looking over my musical collection to see which artists I'd like to see play a home concert, and I was disappointed to realize just how many of my favorites have died or retired. :( I need to find some younger musicians who are just as talented as the best of previous generations. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

A Keb Mo home concert is particularly welcome for me because I've had issues with the production on most of his studio albums. He keeps putting out music that  veers towards "adult contemporary," a la James Taylor, when I most enjoy him playing acoustically. So this concert is great, because it's just him and his acoustic guitar, and there's no crowd noise to mar the sound quality. The Richard Thompson home concert unfortunately was recorded at a low streaming rate, but that's not a problem here. Mo recorded this in a music studio, and the sound quality is fantastic.

Actually, there's one snag about the sound quality, and that's the fact that the concert started out with an extremely low volume for the first couple of songs. Happily, that's something I was easily able to fix with a sound editing program. Mo's talking between songs was also unusually quiet, so I boosted the volume there too.

I did some editing between the songs. If he spend some time tuning his guitar, I usually cut that out. I also cut some of his talking that wasn't interesting. For instance, it's not entirely true that Mo was all alone for the concert. His unnamed wife was never seen, but she was apparently in a nearby control room and occasionally gave him some remote feedback. I edited out some of their back and forth that was technical in nature. For the comments from his wife that I kept it, I had to boost the volume a very large amount, since she was barely audible. So you'll hear a lot of hiss the few occasions when she spoke. All in all, I probably only cut out about five minutes from the concert in total.

Virtually all the songs are Keb Mo originals. But this concert took place a day or two after soul legend Bill Withers died, so he did a cover of "Grandma's Hands" in tribute to him.

The concert is 50 minutes long. Here's a link if you want to watch it as well as hear it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5rq9c4uBME

01 talk (Keb Mo)
02 Muddy Water (Keb Mo)
03 talk (Keb Mo)
04 Grandma's Hands (Keb Mo)
05 talk (Keb Mo)
06 Better Man (Keb Mo)
07 talk (Keb Mo)
08 I Remember You (Keb Mo)
09 talk (Keb Mo)
10 Change (Keb Mo)
11 talk (Keb Mo)
12 Life Is Beautiful (Keb Mo)
13 talk (Keb Mo)
14 Woman in Charge (Keb Mo)
15 talk (Keb Mo)
16 Tell Everybody I Know (Keb Mo)
17 talk (Keb Mo)
18 Rita (Keb Mo)
19 talk (Keb Mo)
20 Every Morning (Keb Mo)
21 talk (Keb Mo)
22 She Just Wants to Dance (Keb Mo)
23 talk (Keb Mo)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15429910/KebM_2020_HomeConcrtFranklnTN__4-4-2020_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo is a screenshot I selected from the home concert.