Gillian Welch & David Rawlings - Acoustic Reckoning, Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, NY, 4-11-2026

Here's something for Grateful Dead fans as well as fans of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings: it's acoustic versions of most of the songs on the 1981 Grateful Dead album "Reckoning," plus many other Grateful Dead covers. There's a lot of music to love here as well, since the concert was almost three hours long. And it took place less than a month ago, as I write this in May 2026.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of searching for concerts that have taken place in the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, due to the leak of dozens of concerts from there a couple of weeks ago. The sound quality of these concerts is excellent, but most of them need work being split into individual song files and such, so I've been checking to see if other people are doing that. These searches have turned up a few things that don't actually come from that big leak, and this is one of them. This is from a webcast instead. So, while the sourcing is different, the sound quality is equally excellent.

Welch and Rawlings have become stars of roots music, blending country, bluegrass, and folk. But while they've released many albums mostly consisting of songs they've written, it turns out they've also been Deadheads all along. In fact, while gathering information for this album, I came across an article talking about how Welch followed the Dead for some concerts in the late 1980s, as Deadheads did. So, apparently just for fun, they decided to perform an entire tour of the U.S. consisting of nothing but covers of Dead songs, as well as cover songs closely associated with the Dead. The tour started in April 2026 with this concert, and will continue through August. So if you're reading this, you might want to go see them live. I checked their setlists at setlist.fm. It turns out they've been varying up their set lists a lot on the tour. They played 24 songs here. But they've done over 40 different ones on the tour so far, and all the songs are those that were performed by the Dead.

The tour was inspired by the Dead's "Reckoning" album, which was semi-acoustic. It's hard to call it fully acoustic, since the band had two drummers. But Welch and Rawlings went even more stripped down, being accompanied by just a bassist (as you can see on the cover image). A majority of the songs performed did appear on "Reckoning," but it's a loose tribute. They skipped some songs from that album, and played quite a few others. I was especially impressed by "St. Stephen," as I didn't know it could sound good with such minimal instrumentation.  

This album is two hours and 52 minutes long. 

01 talk (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
02 Bertha (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
03 Jack Straw (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
04 Oh Babe It Ain't No Lie (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
05 Dire Wolf (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
06 Dark Hollow (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
07 talk (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
08 It Must Have Been the Roses (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
09 Loser (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
10 Friend of the Devil (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
11 Cassidy (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
12 talk (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
13 Cumberland Blues (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
14 Brown-Eyed Women (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
15 I've Been All Around This World (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
16 Deep Elm Blues (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
17 Brokedown Palace (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
18 talk (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
19 He's Gone (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
20 Cold Rain and Snow (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
21 Bird Song (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
22 Ripple (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
23 talk (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
24 Althea (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
25 To Lay Me Down (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
26 St. Stephen (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
27 Not Fade Away - St. Stephen [Reprise] (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
28 Morning Dew (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
29 talk (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/eZTJVaSo

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/o5bi397bmPxuc35/file 

The cover image, from right to left: David Rawlings, Gillian Welch and Paul Kowert. This image was taken at the Fox Theater, in Oakland, California, on April 17th, 2026, less than a week after the concert presented here. The text at the top and the bottom come from a promotional image associated with the webcast. I just resized the words and moved them around.

Brandi Carlile - Target Center, Minneapolis, MN, 2-21-2026

Here's a concert that I'm posting (on February 24, 2026) only three days after it took place. One thing that often stops me from posting recent music is sound quality. But this is a rare exception because the concert was broadcast live on a local radio station. That means the sound quality is excellent.

This concert had special significance because of the city it was taking place in - Minneapolis. This was a regularly scheduled stop on Brandi Carlile's national tour, planned months in advance. But with the battles between I.C.E. and the local populace in Minneapolis, Carlile wanted to broadcast this concert on the radio to help celebrate the successful resistance efforts there. It was also livestreamed nationally, and available for a fee for 24 hours. The concert thus raised $600,000 for a non-profit, the Advocates for Human Rights, who are supporting legal efforts of those detained by I.C.E. So good for Carlile! I hope more musical acts make similar efforts.

If you also want to donate to the same cause, here's their link:

https://www.theadvocatesforhumanrights.org/Home 

This concert got some media attention. Here's a Rolling Stone Magazine article about it, which mainly consists of an interview Carlile gave right after the concert finished:

Brandi Carlile on Resisting Trump, Protesting ICE in Minneapolis 

And here's another article with some further links and photos and so forth:

https://www.jambase.com/article/brandi-carlile-twin-cities-singing-resistance-minneapolis

The song list was pretty similar to other ones on her tour. It mostly consisted of originals, with a few covers thrown in: "Long, Long Time," "Viva la Vida," and "Uninvited." And just for the concert, it ended with "It's Okay to Change Your Mind," which had become a theme song for protesters in Minneapolis. For that song, Carlile was joined on stage by the Singing Resistance, which is a group of hundreds of locals who have been conducting singing vigils to help protest illegal actions by I.C.E.

I didn't change the music here. However, there were frequent interjections by radio DJs between songs to mention the radio station name and so on. I edited all of those out. And there was much longer DJ banter before and after the concert, plus during an unusually long break before the encore. I cut all that out as well.  

Thanks to commenter nytvf for suggesting I check out this concert. I might have missed it otherwise. 

This album is two hours and 22 minutes long. 

01 Returning to Myself (Brandi Carlile)
02 Human (Brandi Carlile)
03 talk (Brandi Carlile)
04 Mainstream Kid (Brandi Carlile)
05 Broken Horses (Brandi Carlile)
06 talk (Brandi Carlile)
07 A War with Time (Brandi Carlile)
08 talk (Brandi Carlile)
09 A Woman Oversees (Brandi Carlile)
10 Right on Time (Brandi Carlile)
11 talk (Brandi Carlile)
12 Who Believes in Angels (Brandi Carlile)
13 talk (Brandi Carlile)
14 Beginning to Feel the Years (Brandi Carlile)
15 talk (Brandi Carlile)
16 The Things I Regret (Brandi Carlile)
17 talk (Brandi Carlile)
18 You without Me (Brandi Carlile)
19 The Mother (Brandi Carlile)
20 talk (Brandi Carlile)
21 The Story (Brandi Carlile)
22 talk (Brandi Carlile)
23 You and Me on the Rock (Brandi Carlile)
24 talk (Brandi Carlile)
25 No One Knows Us (Brandi Carlile)
26 talk (Brandi Carlile)
27 Sinners, Saints and Fools - Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round (Brandi Carlile)
28 talk (Brandi Carlile)
29 Long, Long Time (Brandi Carlile)
30 talk (Brandi Carlile)
31 The Joke (Brandi Carlile)
32 Hold Out Your Hand (Brandi Carlile)
33 talk (Brandi Carlile)
34 Viva la Vida (Brandi Carlile with the Head & the Heart)
35 Church and State (Brandi Carlile)
36 Uninvited (Brandi Carlile)
37 talk (Brandi Carlile)
38 A Long Goodbye - Girl from the North Country (Brandi Carlile)
39 It's Okay to Change Your Mind (Brandi Carlile with the Singing Resistance) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/4yqPQbXg

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/6DPGvIGjM5rq3hI/file

The cover image is from this exact concert.

Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Minneapolis (Live Acoustic Version)

Here's a song that was actually created earlier today, January 30, 2026. I don't think I've ever posted anything this fast at this blog before. Just two days earlier, Bruce Springsteen released a new song called "Streets of Minneapolis," which he had written only a couple of days before that. That released version was performed with a full band. But today, he was in Minneapolis, and he was a guest at a Tom Morello concert held at a small club. While there, he performed two songs, and one of them was "Streets of Minneapolis," done in solo acoustic mode. I thought this version is different enough, and interesting enough, to merit being posted here.

The recording of this song was just done by someone on their cell phone, so there were some sound quality issues. Another reason I'm posting this is because I figured I could make this version more listenable with some audio editing improvements. I used the MVSEP program to reduce the crowd noise during the song. I kept in some roars of the crowd where they were warranted, but I got rid of a lot of ambient noise, as well as random loud screams and woo-hoos. I also used the Adobe vocal enhancer program to add some clarity to Springsteen's comments before the song began.

In case you haven't figured it out from the song title, or from hearing about it already, the song is about the current crisis with I.C.E. misbehaving in Minneapolis. While I'm a political progressive, I usually try to avoid talking about politics on this music blog. But I have to say I'm glad that Springsteen has written a song to express what a majority of people in the U.S. are feeling right now: that I.C.E. is going too far, and they're harassing, hurting, and sometimes even killing people they don't like instead of properly doing their jobs. Democracy is in danger of being replaced by a de facto dictatorship. I hope other musicians follow Springsteen's example and lend their talents to help push back against this power grab.  

Springsteen's performance of this song was newsworthy enough to result in some articles. Here one, from the Daily Beast: 

Bruce Springsteen Kicks Trump ‘In the Teeth’ at Rage-Fueled Show

And here's all of Springsteen's participation in the concert: 

Bruce Springsteen at First Avenue 1/30/26  

After playing his new song, he was joined by a full band, including Tom Morello, and they performed "The Ghost of Tom Joad." Morello played some blistering lead guitar on that one. Then the concert ended with John Lennon's "Power to the People," though really it was just the chorus repeated a few times along with some shouting to get the crowd worked up.

Here's the link to the cleaned-up live acoustic version: 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/yo8eER1S

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/krciqmn65DBSKGU/file

Normally, I post album covers. But this isn't an album. Besides, I'm having problems running Photoshop on my computer in the past few days. So if anyone wants a cover for this, it will have to wait. 

Oh, one final note. The "Brucebase" Bruce Springsteen Wiki has a lot of good links and information relating to this performance, including a bunch of photos. You can find that here:

2026-01-30 First Avenue, Minneapolis, MN - Brucebase Wiki