The story goes that Bruce Springsteen recorded his darkest album Nebraska (1982) in his bedroom, most of it in one day. There are absolutely no adornments, no frills, just his voice and his guitar, sometimes a short bit from his harmonica, not much more. He intended those recordings as demo versions, but they just wouldn’t fly when he played them together with his E-Street Band. So the demo version it was for the album for almost all of the songs. Because the Boss is strumming away on his guitar, the effect is one of being there listening, as if it was a live album in a more unusual sense of the word. The same is true for the Cowboy Junkies’ debut album The Trinity Sessions (1988), which was recorded live in Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity, and the band gathered around the only microphone. Like with Springsteen’s album, there is an immediateness that would be hard to replicate in any studio.

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