I feel like Björk is the one artist who is constantly doing this for me. She'll put out an album, and then fully realize the sophistication of her own song with a new musical palette while on tour. It then gets even better when she re-envisions old songs with the sounds of a new album.
One of my favourites amongst these is 'Enjoy', from her album 'Post'. You can clearly hear the influences from Tricky in the original version, confounded with all of its other makings:
By the time we get to the tour, she has completely stripped the song back to intensify its emotional direction, and play to the London underground crowds with its industrial ambience turned up to feature seamlessly with its trip-hop foundations. Her vocals on show here are also something else.
In more recent times, Björk surprised her fans in a big way during the Vulnicura tour with a new rendition of her debut album song, 'Come To Me', which she hadn't played live for over a decade.
While the original composition playfully lulled the listener to her impulses to nurture through a variety of intense lyrics that were dissonant to the scattered jazz band influences and haunting ambient whooing, it was the drawing out the ambient exotica and lethal strings of the track, combined with impactful production influenced by her work with Arca and Haxan Cloak that really piqued people's attention on the new version. Here, she transformed the track as a woman in command, and fully aware of her own power, this time purposefully sure of the seduction that is taking place, and the importance of that union. It was made especially fitting on a tour deeply influenced by the dissolution of her partnership with Matthew Barney (Vulnicura come to be known as *the* heartbreak album), cleverly woven amongst a setlist illustrating how the variations of our relationships are mirrored in many parts of the natural world, and what gaining your autonomy looks like after co-dependence and feeling broken.
