Music mania
My two Sarah McLachlan CDs, Mirrorball: The Complete Concert and Wintersong, arrived yesterday from Nettwerk. I’m not sure exactly when they were shipped, since the invoice didn’t state this and I didn’t get a shipping confirmation email, but, considering that Wintersong was only released on October 17th, I’ll have to consider this to be extremely fast service, especially given that they came all the way from Canada.
Anyway, the new Mirrorball is great, and I highly recommend that anyone who likes this sort of music picks it up, whether or not they own the original single-disc version. The obvious benefit of the new release is that, as the title implies, it’s a recording of a full concert - in this case the final night of Sarah’s spring 1998 tour. Songs that were missing from the earlier release, including very good performances of Plenty, Vox and Into the Fire, are included here, as well as a few brief bits of talking in between songs. A few of the songs here, including Hold On and Ice Cream, appear to be different recordings from the ones that appeared on the earlier CD, however (they match the performances on the Mirrorball DVD, suggesting that it and the new CD were both culled from the final night of the tour), so it’s probably worth hanging on to both releases for the sake of completeness.
I’m somewhat less enthusiastic about Wintersong, though. As I predicted, the notion of a Christmas album doesn’t really work for me, since the songs are, generally speaking, ones we’ve all heard a million times before and are unlikely to listen to at any time other than around the festive season. The performances themselves are fine, but there are very few tracks here that I would consider listening to on a regular basis. As I predicted, the one original song on the disc, also called Wintersong, is the stand-out, although I also like the Joni Mitchell-penned River and the John Lennon/Yoko Ono piece Happy Xmas (War is Over), although the rendition of the latter is about as generic as they come.
Basically, I’d class Mirrorball as a must-buy; Wintersong, less so, but still worthwhile for completists.
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