Album Of The Day: Live At The Knight by John Mark McMillan

Album Art of John Mark McMillan's Live At The Knight album - A black-and-white photo of a man on a stage in the foreground, facing away from the camera and towards an audience. He's wearing a suit coat and holding a guitar. The audience is on the floor and on a balcony, hundreds and hundreds of people. Obscuring the video on the top and on the right is some sort of light refracting in the lens or some sort of effect to make it look cooler, mostly vertical lines of light. In the middle of the photo is printed in a brownish-gold serif font the album name on one line and then the artist name on a line below.

Released 10 years ago this coming Thursday, this is the first live album by John Mark McMillan, and it's one of my favorite live recordings. Recorded in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina after the release of his excellent Borderland album, this features many songs from that album and his previous albums. John Mark McMillan's brand of rock (some might say soft rock) has many layers of instrumentation, and the stage on this recording was filled with many band members making layers of drums, guitars, bass and keys, plus even some horns and strings on a number of songs as well. His wife, Sarah McMillan, sings lead on a few songs from their You Are The Avalanche EP and does a great job. One of my favorite parts is when John Mark sings "Heart Won't Stop" from that EP and mixes in a cover of "Stand By Me" with some pounding guitar from James Duke. John Mark McMillan loves singing about his relationship with God, but he's also a musician making great music and lyrics about real life too, not just making what the church is looking for, and I really like his style. I like that my physical copy has a CD of a 78-minute version, plus a beautifully-filmed DVD of the full 95-minute concert, but you can listen to the whole version on streaming, thankfully. (I wish it was a Blu-Ray not a DVD, but it still sounds excellent and looks pretty good too.)

Release Year: 2015
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Categories: 
Album Of The Day
Music

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