What is your favorite live version of Sara?

[louielouie2000]

Originally Posted by David

I like the album track the best. It's a major orchestrative win for the band. It's like one of those giant landscape paintings from the eighteenth century that you can gaze at for hours. The abstract hum of the vocals is more important to the song's meaning than the content of the lyrics. Stevie's singing is her most mature studio vocal—it's a Thomas Hardy vocal.

I completely agree. To me, Sara is one of the songs that showcases FM's studio mastery at its finest. It's just so baroquely lush. In my opinion, Sara's transfer to stage was never particularly flattering towards this gorgeous song. There is just a dreamy atmosphere in the original that can never be duplicated onstage.

However, I do have one favorite live version of the song, and that is Stevie's Soundstage rendition. In my opinion, that version completely fixed the pacing issues the song had long suffered from in a live format. To my ear, the live versions of this song just meandered and seemed anticlimactic. Oddly enough, I think Stevie's vocal here is way better than any other live version of Sara, too. Whereas old versions of the song Stevie sounded shaky and overly billy goaty, the Soundstage version just completely nailed it. Somehow it ended up being the closest to the Tusk album version, too.