10 Songs That Actually Got Better Live
When the Crowd Becomes the Instrument.
There's no road map as to how you record a hit song. Sometimes artists just need to be in the right place at the right time to make magic, but that often involves hours of studio tampering until a song is considered great. Then again, a lot of bands have made songs a completely different animal once they reach the stage.
Whether it was because the restraints of the studio or the wrong feel, each of these songs have become classics once they have been played live on tour. For as much time as you have to perfect a song in the studio, the live stage is where you get to really show your stuff, which leads to improvisations and subtle touches that you could never accomplish if you were just in the studio.
While a lot of a song's greatness comes from the artists playing it, the live show also opens up the idea of fan participation, which ends up working wonders in uniting the crowd with the people onstage. It may be fun to play together in a studio, but there's nothing like bringing people together through the raw power of sound, and each of these songs check every one of those boxes.
10. The entire King of Limbs - Radiohead
The King of Limbs is one of the most questionable creative decisions Radiohead have ever made. With songs that were a bit meandering and an incredibly short runtime, the fans hadn't been this cold to one of the band's new releases since the band's alt rock debut on Pablo Honey. Though the album still remains an outlier in their catalog, the real beauty came in once they headed down to the basement.
Released almost a year after the proper album was released, The King of Limbs: Live from the Basement has been heralded by fans as to what the album should have been. While the sonic landscape that Radiohead were trying to create in the studio was certainly admirable, the raw power behind cuts like "Codex" work wonders when they were actually transmitted to the live stage.
Even some of the more trancey tracks like "Bloom" and "Morning Mr. Magpie" work great in the live context, especially when accompanied by the DVD, where you see the band playing off each other to the fullest extent. The live format also gives the band a chance to polish off some of the single one-offs like "The Daily Mail," which feels as much a part of the experience as what was actually included on the album. The King of Limbs may have been a fumble, but this one performance showed there was a lot of potential underneath the studio haze.