Recorded during Built to Spill's 1999 U.S. tour, Live captures this inventive Boise, Idaho, trio in full creative bloom, mixing Spartan rock structures with marathons of searching guitar solos and exploratory jams. Some songs are given a new tone: "The Plan" has a more desperate edge than it did on last year's Keep It Like a Secret, with Doug Martsch's guitar and his distinctive voice raging, tremulously, in the upper registers. Other tracks inflate like feedback-filled balloons: "Randy Described Eternity" is a dense dirge spotlighting the tension between Martsch's caustic noodling and the weighty chord shifts of touring partners Brett Netson and Jim Roth. "Broken Chairs" and a cover of Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer" stretch out to twenty (mostly instrumental) minutes apiece. There is no stage chatter on this album, because there's no room for it between the long grooves.

“He Will Break Your Heart”

A lightly swinging Latin-influenced, almost cha-cha groove and close harmonies decorated Jerry Butler's early soul hit "He Will Break Your Heart," delivering a stately warning that his rival would never love his girl like he did. The melody came to Butler as he was driving on the highway from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Philadelphia with Curtis Mayfield, and as Butler told Rolling Stone, "I just sang the melody and Curtis put the chords to it." The song's premise, Butler added, "was something that I'd lived ...The lyric was an experience rather than a revelation. Whereas music is usually a revelation."