Donavon Frankenreiter at Conrad Sohm in Austria in 2007 (Photo by Robert Mölzer)

Donavon Frankenreiter is an artist I’ve mostly heard jamming with his long-time friend Jack Johnson on acoustic guitars, but I haven’t listened that much to his own stuff.

In this week’s recording, Donavon and his band are opening for Gov’t Mule, so his set is a pretty short one, less than 50 minutes. The recording is available in all the usual formats: Flac, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, or can be played in the onsite player.

Donavon Frankenreiter Band Live at Palace Theatre on 2006-11-30

All of the Donavon Frankenreiter shows in the Live Music Archive are under “Donavon Frankenreiter Band.” I haven’t seen “Band” appear elsewhere, and as far as I can tell, that’s what it usually is when it just says his name.

Many of the songs in this show are from Donavon’s self-titled album from 2004, which was released by Jack Johnson’s Brushfire label. The opener is called Free, a song Jack also cowrote and used to play frequently at his own shows. It’s a small catchy tune, like many of Donavon’s.

The next three songs, What ‘Cha Know About, It Don’t Matter and Call Me Papa are also from the same album. The first one of them contains a nice guitar solo by Donavon. Call Me Papa has an interpolation of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man in the middle of it, such a mellow version of the classic. Donavon sure got used to playing southern rock songs in his previous band, Sunchild.

The remaining four songs are from Donavon’s second album, Move by Yourself. Fool, All Around Us and That’s Too Bad are bluesy songs with a slightly more electric sound than the rest of the show. This is a nice recording with an okay sound quality, and it won’t take too long to listen.