Martina Mcbride - Recommendations

Would like to start collecting some Martina Mcbride albums as i think she has got a great country voice.

Three part question.

1.Recommendations for her best albums?
2.Recommendations for the best albums sound quality wise?
3.Has she made a live album that is worth investing in?

Thanks in advance.

 

Question #1
My personal favourites are:
The Way That I Am
Wild Angels
Timeless
Everlasting

Question #2
I don't know everything about all the different masterings available, but I do know that The Way That I Am and Wild Angels exist in remastered form. Those discs are much louder and worse sounding than the original CDs. I guess picking up early pressings on auction sites is the best way to go when it comes to sound quality. They're incredibly cheap.

Question #3
As far as I know there's only the Live In Concert DVD/CD set. The CD doesn't make sense since it's heavily edited, but the DVD is a nice run through her career up until 2007. Nothing surprising but for fans it's nice to have.

 

That's the only one I own... I actually inherited it, didn't purchase it on my own, but yeah, it's a pretty good album...

 

My favorites are The Way That I Am, Wild Angels, and Evolution. That’s where I think Martina is at her best. She’s good at singing the classics and Christmas songs, too, but those early albums have her uniqueness.

 

All her albums have something to offer, though she did move into poppier fare occasionally. My faves are;

Evolution (1997)
Wild Angels (1995)
Emotion (1999)
The Way That I Am (1993)
Eleven (2011)
Timeless (2005)

Albums like Martina (2003), Waking Up Laughing (2007) and Shine (2009) are patchier. Some of her material is horribly sentimental. Like God's Will from the aforementioned Martina album. It's hideous! Her 2001 Greatest Hits album is worth getting as it includes 4 new songs unavailable anywhere else.

Great voice, as you say. In the UK we had CMT Europe between 1993-97. She was just beginning to get noticed then and her videos were played contstantly.

 

Beside the music itself, I'd like to give a special recommendation for "Timeless" for a special reason. Not only is it a great selection of songs (cover versions of great country classics), it's also her best album production-wise (what I have heard so far). Yes, I would call it audiophile. I wish there were a SACD or Hi-Res version of it...

Great dynamics, no unnecessary compression, wonderfully recorded and mixed by her husband John McBride at his "Blackbird Studio" in Nashville, have a look here:



Unfortunately, almost all of her other albums since the 2000's are deep in "brickwalled country" and hard to listen to.