Kate Rusby - Live from Leeds
South Yorkshire folk singer-songwriter Kate Rusby celebrates a decade-plus as a recording artist and performer with this live concert, mostly adapted from her popular studio albums and replete with her typically evocative, emotional immediacy singing ancient ballads, sea shanties, and lullabies. Highlights include the infectious waltz, "Polly," the sprightly, hopeful "I Courted a Sailor," and Rusby's crystalline vocal on "The White Cockade." Backed by her outstanding, all-acoustic band, Rusby's celebrated talent for making an old sound feel new again drives the delicate plaint "Who Will Sing Me Lullabies," the pop-like "The Cobbler's Daughter," and the sad "Withered and Died," which sounds very much like the passage of heartbreaking events into memory. Newcomers to Rusby may wonder if those songs in her repertoire having to do with dragons, knights, and fair maidens (such as this set's "Sir Eglamore") are terribly precious, but they actually prove as personally expressive as anything else she does.--Tom Keogh