There’s something special about the best live recordings. It’s that indescribable mix of passion and place that can serve as a time capsule, allowing fans to relive a moment of musical ecstasy over and over. Unfortunately, some get tampered with and tweaked until the magic of the moment escapes. On Saturday, John Moreland will stop in at The Blue Room at Third Man Records, and he and the TMR crew will be doing everything they can to avoid that.
Moreland, one of the folk world’s most intense artists, will hook himself up to a unique machine that rewards such intensity: Third Man’s vintage live-to-acetate recording rig. The process perfectly captures the imperfection of a real, live performance. The master disc from which all copies will be made is cut on their lathe in real time as the show is happening, rather than from a recording, eliminating the possibility of retakes, overdubs or anything else.
Since the company revived this technique about a decade ago — and it seems they’re still the only ones to do so, at least while incorporating it into a venue — they’ve gone about recording select shows in all their raw, unfiltered glory. Moreland is the ideal next candidate. The rig can immortalize a collective moment, using a finely tuned instrument to slice a permanent groove into the spinning acetate disc. That’s basically what Moreland does to your soul, too.
Ever since breaking out with 2015’s High on Tulsa Heat, the poetic songwriter has dug deep into the darker corners of the human condition, laying out what he’s found for all to pick through. Like others given the live-to-acetate treatment before him — Billie Eilish and The Melvins among them — Moreland takes the ugly truth and makes it into something beautiful, with a sound that drives the point home.
Early in his journey into the singer-songwriter world, the Oklahoma-born former hardcore punk sounded like a holdover from the Dust Bowl era: a bluesman with the weight of the modern world on his shoulders, wielding only an acoustic guitar and his craggy but expressive vocal. Although his 2022 album Birds in the Ceiling flies further afield sonically than before, his unvarnished approach to performance remains intact.
Still grounded by aching vocal confessions, fearlessly honest and clinging to the hope that sunshine is the best disinfectant, he creates hypnotic, trancelike contemplations onstage. He tends toward gentle strumming and scalpel-sharp lyrics, with which he cleaves the emotional bedrock of inner turmoil into monuments.
“I don’t ever want to sound like I have answers, because I don’t,” Moreland says in Birds in the Ceiling’s press materials, perhaps oversimplifying his gift for self-reflection. “These songs are all questions. Everything I write is just trying to figure stuff out.”
In the otherworldly Blue Room, those questions will turn even more engrossing, with a massive elephant head looming over the audience from the back wall, among other retro-chic decor, and with lab-coated recording engineers peering into the crowd from the control room. It’s an optimally weird setting for an equally quirky endeavor, pulled back to life after being left behind by “progress.”
Most popular from the 1930s through the ’50s, the live-to-acetate process is a true holdover of the industrial optimism of the early 20th century. Today it feels like analog magic.
According to Third Man, their 1950s Scully lathe once cut masters for Cincinnati’s King Records, possibly even the original version of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World.” On Record Store Day in 2014, TMR chief Jack White and his band used said rig to set a record for the fastest studio-to-store recording. (That’d be “Lazaretto” backed with “Power of My Love.”) Seeing the process in action and being part of it is an experience all to itself. But as a relic of the recording arts, it can be temperamental and takes skilled hands to operate, hence the lab-coated engineers.
So why even bother? Back in 2013, when TMR released its first live-to-acetate LPs (from The Shins, The Kills and Seasick Steve), the company explained: “We believe that this new/old method of recording is as honest as it gets, bringing listeners as close to the experience of the performance as possible.”
With John Moreland, that experience is something worth capturing. And the more honest, the better.
