It’s rare for us to feature a live album, rarer still one that draws primarily from a record we’ve already covered, but Live at Glasshaus is a precious document of an artist in her most natural element, doing what she was born to do, and it’s absolutely worth your time.

Annahstasia’s debut album Tether arrived last year and made its way onto many end of year lists, announcing her as a generational talent that’s considered, graceful, poised, and powerful. A folk record that showcased a voice of extraordinary range and beauty and an intricate fingerpicked style, Live at Glasshaus illuminates the same songs from Tether from a different angle. Recorded in Brooklyn for an intimate audience of one hundred guests, the chamber ensemble assembled for the occasion creates a word of grandeur from acoustic means with no effects pedals, and perhaps even no reverb applied to Annahstasia’s voice beyond what the room naturally provides.

What the live setting does above all else is push the stories to the front. On Tether, the focus was perhaps more on the beauty of the music and the intricacy of the playing, but here the words are right at the forefront. The same lyrics and melodies somehow arrive with more urgent and naked meaning, because Annahstasia is making individual choices specific to this moment, this room, and these one hundred people, making decisions about when to hold back and when to belt with force that coudn’t have been made in a studio because they’re responses to what’s happening right there and then.

Nina Simone’s influence on Annahstasia’s work has never been more audible than it is here, with the ability to communicate vast emotion through the subtlest shifts. Moving from breathy, husky earthiness to something close to a wail, the performance that perhaps demonstrates this most completely is Villain. On Tether you could simply be taken in by the beauty of the music, but here the story of different perspectives on heartbreak and complex feelings lands with full force as you follow every word. It’s the same song, and yet it’s not the same experience at all.

Satisfy Me opens the session slower than its studio counterpart, and Believer which closes it is faster than its album version, the journey from one to the other tracing a gradual, deliberate increase in emotional intensity throughout the performance. Saturday, drawn from her earlier work, is a beautiful three and a half minute highlight that in retrospect pointed clearly towards where she was heading. Annahstasia is clearly an artist for whom performance is the point, and for whom an album is a step towards the stage rather than an end in itself, and Live at Glasshaus captures her in the setting most precious to her before the next chapter begins.

There’s a profound dignity in everything Annahstasia touches. She’s someone who cares deeply about getting things right, and about the beauty surrounding the performance as much as the performance itself. The care she’s invested in every element of Live at Glasshaus is palpable.