Almost Live was released by Sugar Hill on July 14, 2009 (SUG-CD 4040), and is billed as Bryan Sutton and Friends. It was Sutton’s fourth solo album for the label and the first since Not Too Far from the Tree in 2006. The idea, as Bluegrass Today described it before release, was to bring into the studio several of the groups Sutton had toured with and capture the informal, sometimes extemporaneous character of a live show. Hot Rize, the Punch Brothers and Béla Fleck’s Acoustic Planet band each appear on at least one track, and Wikipedia counts seventeen guest musicians, among them Fleck, Jerry Douglas, Russ Barenberg, Chris Thile and Stuart Duncan.
Eight of the ten tracks are instrumentals, among them “Morning Top,” “Big Island Hornpipe,” “Rye Straw Suite,” “Kitchen Girl” and “Loretta’s Waltz.” Sutton wrote the bulk of the material. “Big Island Hornpipe” is a co-write with Thile, finished while Sutton was touring with Thile’s band, and “Rye Straw Suite” is a duet with Fleck, with whom he wrote it. The two vocal tracks are Norman Blake’s “Church Street Blues,” played with Hot Rize and sung by Tim O’Brien with Sutton on backing vocal, and the Delmore Brothers’ “Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar,” with Thile.
Tracklist
- 1 Morning Top 4:25
- 2 Big Island Hornpipe 3:49
- 3 Rye Straw Suite 4:50
- 4 Church Street Blues alt version 3:39
- 5 Le Pont De La Moustache 4:46
- 6 Dark Island 4:33
- 7 Wonder Valley Gals 2:44
- 8 Kitchen Girl Source Recording 3:13
- 9 Loretta's Waltz 4:39
- 10 Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar alt version 3:15
