Michelle Shocked - Theatre of Living Arts, Philadelphia, PA, 11-8-1996

Here's something special, because I don't think it's been publicly shared before. I got this concert from my musical friend Lil Panda, who has a very large musical collection. He was at this concert, and he says it turned him into a big Michelle Shocked fan. I figured out the names of all the songs and broke things up so the songs and the banter are all separate tracks. 

The sound quality is excellent; I'm assuming it's a soundboard. The only snag is there's one or more songs missing near the end. I don't remember the exact details and I can't check since I'm posting this while on vacation, but I remember getting that impression due to the comments she made between the songs.

Michelle Shocked has become a controversial figure in recent years. She started out as a musical darling of progressives, in a similar vein to Tracy Chapman and the Indigo Girls. But in the mid-1990s or thereabouts she became a fundamentalist Christian, and her music increasingly featured religious gospel music. She made some controversial comments in 2013, and her musical career seems to pretty much be on hold since then. The last studio album she put out was in 2009.

I'm not a fan of her later gospel phase. That said, I still find plenty to enjoy in her music from the 1980s and 1990s. This concert comes from a time when her career was already in trouble, due to conflicts with her record company. That's a whole other story, but she was still doing just fine musically when this concert was recorded. Some of it is acoustic, and some of it is done with a full band, including a horn section. Many of the songs were unreleased at the time, and some of them still seem to be unreleased to this day.

Even with the probable missing songs at the end, the concert is a whopping two hours and 25 minutes long. There's a lot of talking between songs. If that's not your cup of tea, you can cut that all out and still have a sizeable and enjoyable concert recording.

01 Innocence Waits (Michelle Shocked)
02 talk (Michelle Shocked)
03 Why Do I Get the Feeling (Michelle Shocked)
04 talk (Michelle Shocked)
05 Little Billy (Michelle Shocked)
06 talk (Michelle Shocked)
07 Poor Boy (Michelle Shocked)
08 Don't Tell (Michelle Shocked)
09 Cleveland (Michelle Shocked)
10 talk (Michelle Shocked)
11 Lucky Dog (Michelle Shocked)
12 talk (Michelle Shocked)
13 Anchorage (Michelle Shocked)
14 talk (Michelle Shocked)
15 Come a Long Way (Michelle Shocked)
16 talk (Michelle Shocked)
17 If Love Was a Train (Michelle Shocked)
18 talk (Michelle Shocked)
19 Prodigal Daughter [Cotton Eyed Joe] (Michelle Shocked)
20 talk (Michelle Shocked)
21 Quality of Mercy (Michelle Shocked)
22 talk (Michelle Shocked)
23 Peach Fuzz (Michelle Shocked)
24 talk (Michelle Shocked)
25 Tabloid (Michelle Shocked)
26 talk (Michelle Shocked)
27 Stillborn (Michelle Shocked)
28 talk (Michelle Shocked)
29 Homestead (Michelle Shocked)
30 talk (Michelle Shocked)
31 V.F.D (Michelle Shocked)
32 talk (Michelle Shocked)
33 A Child Like Grace (Michelle Shocked)
34 talk (Michelle Shocked)
35 The Troubles I've Known (Michelle Shocked)
36 talk (Michelle Shocked)
37 Juicy Lucy (Michelle Shocked)

https://www33.zippyshare.com/v/tpTwbIFV/file.html

As with yesterday's post, I'm unable to make the cover art at this time, since I'm on vacation and I don't have access to programs like Photoshop. But I'll fix that when I return home in a couple of weeks. (And, as a reminder, I'm not sharing my musical files through SoulseekQT until I get home, for similar reasons.)

UPDATE: PJ from the Albums I Wish Existed made a cover for me. Thanks to him! Here it is above.