Elton John - Philadelphia Freedom
Live at the Pine Knob Music Theatre in Clarkston, MI
August 17, 1986
I spent a long, long time working on this recording back earlier on this year, constantly trying to find ways to make it sound better. I finally finished with this result, and I'm extremely proud of how much the work paid off. This is an insane improvement over the original, if the original was a C on the quality scale, this has bumped it to a B/B+. And I spent the time on it primarily because of this track.
This live performance of the song is my favorite version of the song of all time. The band goes at a higher tempo, the arrangement is the best arrangement the song has ever had, Elton is in good voice with great energetic singing, the atmosphere and energy and enthusiasm from the audience creates an amazing electricity to the performance, and also I kind of like the ambience of the more reverb-heavy acoustics of the venue, gives the recording a cool sound.