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Album Cover Loggins & Messina - Loggins & Messina On Stage (Columbia/Legacy)

This is an incredible collection of songs from one of the best songwriting duos of the seventies, Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina. While you might not instantly connect the names with any actual songs, we've all grown up with the pieces included here, from "House on Pooh Corner" to "Your Mama Don't Dance"-okay, so you know who I'm talking about now?

The live versions of these songs is even better than the studio versions-Loggins' voice resonates pitch-perfect throughout the disc(s), barely backed by instruments for an almost a capella version of "House of Pooh Corner" and just plain rocking out on "Angry Eyes," while Messina works the crowd into what could only be called a friendly frenzy with his country pickin' sing-alongs.

While most of the tracks here were recorded at Loggins' and Messina's sold-out Carnegie Hall show in '73, a few tracks come from an industry personnel-only show at Winterland Arena. These are two performers that should have never parted ways-Loggins is an incomparable singer and a lousy wordsmith, while Messina is a poet in every sense of the word with a limited range when it comes to music, but the two of them together have created some of the best-loved, generation-spanning music in the past twenty years.

by Holly Day

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