Sierra Ferrell - Live At Third Man Records

Direct-to-acetate is the highest wire act in recorded music. No overdubs, no punch-ins, no fixing it later. The band plays, the lathe cuts, and whatever happens in that room is the record forever. Sierra Ferrell closed out her 2025 tour by walking into the Blue Room in Nashville and doing exactly that.

She had earned the swagger. Earlier that year she swept the Grammys, going four for four with wins for Best Americana Album for Trail of Flowers, Best Americana Performance and Best American Roots Song for "American Dreaming," and Best American Roots Performance for "Lighthouse." That made her the night's second-biggest winner behind only Kendrick Lamar, which is a strange and wonderful sentence to write about a bluegrass singer from Charleston, West Virginia.

The set moves the way her shows do, from originals to old-time standards without ever announcing the seam. "American Dreaming," "Bells of Every Chapel," "Rosemary," "Dollar Bill Bar," and "I Could Drive You Crazy" sit alongside "Fox Hunt," "I'll Come Off the Mountain," and a run through "Chittlin' Cookin' Time in Cheatham County," and the whole thing lands on a reading of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams." Ferrell's voice does the heavy lifting, that cracked-porcelain vibrato that can go from parlor sweetness to full holler in a single line, and the band stays loose enough to sound like people rather than a click track.

Live albums usually smooth out the edges. This one leaves them in, because the format gives it no choice, and the record is better for it.

Pressed on red vinyl through Third Man Records. A one-take document from an artist at the peak of a very good year, and the kind of pressing that tends to disappear fast.