For five years now, fans have been asking for a follow-up to Ani’s first live album, Living in Clip. This fall, the wait is over: The new double-disc CD So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter offers up 2 hours of music including 3 previously unrecorded songs and 20 more compositions from every phase of Ani’s career, all recorded with the beloved 6-piece band she toured with from 2000-2002.
Like Revelling/Reckoning, this tidy little package is really two records in one. Disc One, subtitled "Stray Cats" is what Ani calls "a feral collection of set list standards and a few anomalies," by which she means (among other things) versions of songs you won’t hear this way anywhere else. Disc Two, "Girls Singing Night," is structured more like one of the shows from her last tours with the band, from walk-on music all the way to the encore, even though the individual tracks come from all over the place.
Heres what the Little Folksinger herself has to say about the project: "I gave up very quickly on the notion of finding perfect versions of any of these songs; there’s no such thing on tape, let alone in my mind. The performances are flawed, certainly, but my mission became simply to find technically passable tapes from nights I remember enjoying, listen to the songs I was interested in representing, and then ask myself the question, Is the spirit here?’"
You can be sure there’s spirit aplenty in the live recordings Ani has chosen to release. And we’ll have much more to say about So Much Shouting as its street date draws near, so check back here soon for more info.