Showing posts with label Emmylou Harris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emmylou Harris. Show all posts
Monday, February 04, 2019
Monday, April 22, 2013
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
How We Met: Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell
'She told me she had an extra ticket; I went the next day and stayed for seven years'
Sunday, 24 February 2013
Emmylou Harris, 62
A 12-time Grammy winner, Harris has been at the forefront of country music for 40 years, selling 15 million albums and collaborating with artists including Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Ryan Adams and, most memorably, Gram Parsons. She lives in Nashville with her mother.
The first time I heard of Rodney I was in Toronto with my producer Brian Ahern. It must have been 1974 and I was there to choose material for the LP I was going to do later that year, but there wasn't anything that interested me. As the day went on there was still nothing. Finally Brian said, "I've only got one more recording by this young songwriter." It was still in the mailing envelope. He stuck it in the machine and there was Rodney singing "Bluebird Wine". It was so fresh and real and his voice was incredible. I said, "OK, this is the one."
Brian asked Rodney to fly to Washington DC, which was where I was living, and we got along great. We talked about music all night. It was great to find a new writer who was of my generation. He was like a kid brother. If we had grown up together we would have been making music together all our lives.
It was obvious to me that he would end up playing in my band. He was a great energy source and a great compadre. A few months later the band and I came through Austin, Texas, where he lived. He came to the show and I said to him, "Why not come on out to LA with us?" So he did, and he stayed. Rodney and I were both pretty young in those days. We were these two kids who were learning as we went.
We have a rich, rewarding friendship. So many other friends and so much great music has come from it. We had always talked about making a duets album together, but the right time, when neither of us were touring or doing other things, never seemed to come.
I was the one who finally made the call this time. I hadn't written any songs since making [2011's] Hard Bargain and I think perhaps I was tired of it all being me. It's quite a thing being out front on your own all the time.
Also – and this may sound a little morbid – you get to a stage where you start losing friends and a sense that you have a finite amount of time. I didn't want Rodney or me to regret that we didn't get around to doing it. So finally, we made an album together. And I have to say, I think it's a good one.
Rodney Crowell, 62
The Grammy-winning country musician was a producer, guitarist and songwriter-for-hire before finding solo success with the album 'Diamonds & Dirt' in 1988. His songs have been recorded by artists including Bob Seger and Crystal Gayle. He lives in Nashville with his wife, the singer Claudia Church.
I had known of Emmylou before we met. I'd heard her singing with Gram Parsons on record and had happily climbed into the intimate world that they had created. The first time I laid eyes on her, she was playing a show at a folk club in Washington DC. There was talk of her recording one of my songs, so I had gone to meet her. Afterwards, we went to the house of one of her friends and sat until the wee hours with guitars talking about songs. I would sing an obscure Townes Van Zandt song, or a Louvin Brothers song, and she would say, "I know that!"
Of course, me being a 24-year-old male, it was love at first sight, but she was actually the first person to teach me about the beauty of a real friendship with a woman. I also had huge respect for her as an artist – and of course the fact that she drew the attention of the music industry to my songs.
We met again in Austin, where we played on stage together, then she asked me to come to LA. She told me she had an extra ticket so I went the next day and stayed for seven years. I was writing songs and providing her with new material. I joined her band, half of whom were also playing in Elvis's band, so I knew I'd gone up a level. The world was beautiful, big and all out in front of us.
Our friendship is not unlike a sibling relationship: intense and held together by love. Our conversation hasn't changed much over 40 years – it's about our faith and passion when it comes to music, and our sense of wonder that these songs that we love even exist.
A lot of the time we're in different parts of the world and five years can go by not seeing each other. Then I'll run into her backstage somewhere or at an airport and it's as if no time has passed.
What has changed is that I have grown into my own skin. It's only in recent years that I've been truly comfortable both as a performer and as a person, which makes it a perfect time for us to collaborate. Making an album together has been great, not least because I've had dinner with my friend more times in the past year than we have in the past 15.
Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell's 'Old Yellow Moon' is out on 4 March
Rodney Crowell, Emmylou Harris come full circle on 'Old Yellow Moon'
Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris
Rick Diamond/WireImage
February 20, 2013 11:00 AM ET
Emmylou Harris laughs when she's asked how long her new album of duets with Rodney Crowell has been in the works. "Thirty years?" she says.
At least. Old Yellow Moon, due February 26th, is the latest entry in a long-standing relationship: Harris has been recording Crowell's songs since "Bluebird Wine," the opening track on her 1975 major-label debut, Pieces of the Sky. He played guitar and sang backup in an early incarnation of her Hot Band in the Seventies, and she backed him on his first solo album in 1978. They've been talking about recording an album together since then, but though they've been friends and co-written tunes over the years, the timing never worked out for a full-on
"I think we always knew we would do a record together one day," Harris tells Rolling Stone. "I guess it was sometime last year that I said, 'You know, if we're going to do this record, we've got to put a fence around some time and get started.'"
It didn't take long once they did. Crowell offered four new songs for the album, which they rounded out with eight covers they chose from among various options each suggested while sitting around producer Brian Ahern's kitchen table in Nashville.
"Brian brought a bunch of songs, Rodney and I both brought songs, and we would listen every day. And if it was something that we liked, we'd set about finding a key and a sketch of an arrangement and make a demo of it right there at the table," Harris says. In fact, the title track is the version they recorded on the spot at Ahern's house.
"We were going to cut it with a bunch of musicians, but we decided that what we got in that moment was perfect," Harris says.
Choosing songs wasn't far different from how they worked in the old days. In fact, one of the tunes they recorded was from the old days: Harris and Crowell recorded a new version of "Bluebird Wine," cementing the full-circle aspect of Old Yellow Moon.
"I love the fact that although Rodney wrote it, he had never actually recorded it himself to put on any of his records," Harris says. "I thought it should be included because it was one of those early points of our collaboration as musicians and friends."
Crowell agreed, with one caveat: he wanted to touch up the words. "I wrote those lyrics when I was 21 years old. I could have done it better," he tells Rolling Stone. "I revised the first couple of verses and said, 'OK, I can stand behind this.'"
The tune was Harris' introduction to Crowell back in 1974, when Ahern (to whom she was married in the late Seventies and early Eighties) gave her a demo while they was looking for material for Pieces of the Sky. "The first song was 'Bluebird Wine,'" Harris says. "I loved his voice, I loved his material, so Brian got on the phone and started trying to track him down."
Crowell flew to Washington D.C., where Harris was living at the time, to play some songs with her. He had recently moved to Austin, and when Harris came through on tour, she offered him a job. "She said, 'Hey, I've got an extra ticket, I'm going to L.A. tomorrow, do you want to go?'" Crowell recalls. "And I said, 'Yeah, I'll go,' and I stayed seven years."
He spent three of those years in her Hot Band before striking out on his own as a performer and producer, leading to decades of crossed connections before they found the time to make Old Yellow Moon. It's not, strictly speaking, a country record – each has veered closer to folk and Americana over the past 20 years – but it follows a proud country tradition that Harris first learned when she sang with Gram Parsons in the Seventies.
"I came to country music through duet singing with Gram and hanging out with Gram," Harris says. "I love it. I love the sound of two voices together, whether it's two women or two men or a man and a woman. It just creates a third voice, and I love the conversational aspect of it."
Harris has been a sought-after duet partner for years, contributing vocals to albums by Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, Mark Knopfler, Steve Earle, Ryan Adams and Conor Oberst, among plenty of others. Teaming with Crowell again, though, was like coming home. "It's kind of in our blood," she says.
Crowell elaborates. "There's never been a lack of chemistry for Emmy and I," he says. "For a lot of the time when she was putting together the original Hot Band, it was just she and I, and we sat around playing the Louvin Brothers' songs and looking for those arcane melodies that work best with two voices."
Their shared history means a shared repertoire for the tour that will accompany Old Yellow Moon, which begins March 13th in New Orleans. "I don't think we'll have any problem finding material," Harris says. "If there's any problem, it'll be that we have too much."
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Rodney Crowell, Emmylou Harris find harmony on 'Old Yellow Moon'
By Peter Cooper
The Tennessean
February 22, 2013
The Tennessean
February 22, 2013
Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris
How do you sing in harmony?
Let’s go to an authority.
Let’s ask the most prominent harmony vocalist of our time, one whose voice has blended elegantly with Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Willie Nelson, Keith Whitley, George Jones,Solomon Burke, Elvis Costello, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Roy Orbison, Mark Knopfler, Gram Parsons, Little Feat, Dan Fogelberg and three out of five ironically mustached East Nashville hipster baristas.
Let’s ask Emmylou Harris.
“I really don’t know,” says the Country Music Hall of Famer, whose latest project comes out on Tuesday: “Old Yellow Moon” is an enchanting, harmony-laden duo album with old friend Rodney Crowell.
Come now, Ms. Harris. That’s like a member of Congress not knowing how to create gridlock, or a Goo Goo Cluster not knowing how to be delicious, or Taylor Swift not knowing how to make the “Oh, my God, I’m totally shocked!” face.
“Really,” Harris swears. “I’ve never studied intervals or parts. Whatever I’ve done came from total ignorance and fearlessness. For me, it’s whatever isn’t the melody.”
Instant chemistry
Harris has been practicing vocal ignorance and fearlessness with Crowell for nearly four decades. They met in 1974, shortly after Harris heard a Crowell demo tape that included “Bluebird Wine,” which became the lead-off song on Harris’ first major label solo album, “Pieces of the Sky.” Crowell joined Harris’ Hot Band in 1975.
“Even before the Hot Band was formed, Rodney and I would sit on the floor in the house at Lania Lane (location of Coldwater Canyon estate where “Pieces of the Sky,” “Elite Hotel” and other works were produced by Harris’ then-husband, Brian Ahern). We’d sing ‘Sweet Dreams’ and lots of old country songs, and that was a big part of my education.”
Harris and Crowell bonded over The Louvin Brothers, the Everly Brothers, the harmonies ofBuck Owens and Don Rich and other classic pairings. Harris didn’t “study” the parts so much as she internalized them, and she and Crowell quickly ascertained that they created a third voice when singing together that was equally as compelling as their solo voices.
“We found our voice so many years ago,” Crowell says. “There’s a certain tone we can get together. She’s one of music’s great voices, and I’m a pretty good singer, too. You get us together, in the right key with the right melody, and we can make it sizzle. There’s that extra bit of tonality.”
Crowell says that with wonder, not braggadocio. Harmony singing is a mystery dance, and he feels lucky to have partnered with Harris. The sound they make together is unlike the sound any other duo makes.
That’s always the case with harmonies, but the trouble is that sometimes a blend — even a blend of masterful lead singers — isn’t pleasing to the ear. Please refer to Frank Sinatra’s hit-and-miss duets albums for more information. Or don’t, and just know that harmony singing is much more about chemistry than precision.
“Immediately with Rodney, that chemistry and energy was there,” Harris says. “From the beginning, it was obvious that we’d be friends and cohorts and collaborators.”
A bigger blessing
Harris and Crowell’s chemistry class is a joy to attend.
With Ahern helming the production, “Old Yellow Moon” provides resplendent versions of four Crowell songs (including a new take on “Bluebird Wine), three songs from former Hot Band member Hank DeVito and compelling music penned by Roger Miller, Patti Scialfa, Allen Reynoldsand Matraca Berg.
(By the way, dear reader, if you recognized that I have seamlessly integrated the titles of two Elvis Costello songs — “Chemistry Class” and “Mystery Dance” — into this story, you probably need to find a hobby or something.)
Crowell describes the sessions as “an honor and a privilege,” but what about the shadows cast by expectation? Folks have waited decades for a Harris/Crowell duo album.
“I didn’t hear those expectations, or feel them or see them,” Crowell says. “I love Emmy and she loves me, and Brian’s an old friend and a key ingredient to how we got started. In some ways, we were sillier when we were younger, and we took things like this for granted. This process, this day’s work, was a bigger blessing than we understood it to be when we were in our 20s.”
Right, but how’d you do it? How’s it done?
“You open your mouth and trust the song and the singer and go for it,” Harris says. “You don’t think about it.”
Which is, apparently, how you sing in harmony. You lose yourself in a moment.
“Right,” assures Crowell. “If you can get in there and do it unconsciously, chances of achieving something somewhat timeless go up exponentially.”
If all this is true — if fearless, unconscious ignorance is the key to singing in harmony — then some of us may have a new career path. Maybe you figured it was too hard, like finding a needle in a haystack, or a horse that knows arithmetic, or a dog that tells your fortune.
Turns out it’s uncomplicated. Who knew?
“I really don’t know,” says Emmylou Harris. But, really, she does.
Reach Peter Cooper at 615-259-8220 or pcooper@tennessean.com.
Tennessean Music
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Monday, April 02, 2012
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
Emmylou Harris, in the moment
Her new album is called 'Hard Bargain,' but at 64, the singer-songwriter seems at ease with her life thus far.
By Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/
April 24, 2011
NASHVILLE —— Emmylou Harris is trailed by a ragtag parade of eager dogs when she answers a knock at the door of the comfortable two-story home on a fenceless parcel a few miles from downtown Nashville, where she lives with her 89-year-old mother, Eugenia.
The singer and songwriter greets a visitor with the same unguarded openness with which she has welcomed in a steady stream of abandoned, abused or otherwise homeless canines as part of the Bonaparte's Retreat animal rescue operation she's run for the last several years.
One of them, Bella, is a large, gentle mutt who is the subject of "Big Black Dog," one of the songs from Harris' forthcoming album "Hard Bargain," her first in nearly three years. It's a lighthearted yet sincere ode to the loyalty and unconditional love that she prizes about her work with her animal companions.
"We probably give them too many human qualities, but they inhabit a world we might never understand. That's one of the reasons they can help us be more human," she says, settling into a small sofa in an upstairs bedroom she's converted into a music room. It's one of a couple of spaces at home where she likes to write.
Sheets of paper with lyrics are nearby on a music stand, a raft of guitars rest a few feet away, poised to assist when inspiration strikes. The walls around the stairway that leads to her workspace are adorned with family photos; inside her office are framed pictures and artwork of a smattering of the musicians — Johnny Cash and June Carter, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Gram Parsons — she's worked with over a recording career that now spans more than four decades since her largely unheralded debut album, "Gliding Bird," yet another animal allusion in her long, distinguished career.
"From the time you're born until the end of your life, I think they are our dearest companions," says Harris, her white-silver hair pulled up through a black scrunchie into a pony tail. She's wearing a comfortable black sweater, stylish scarf and knockabout thick black pants on a cool spring day during which the area is under the specter of tornado warnings.
An interaction with an animal is far less complicated than a relationship with another human. The latter are at the heart of Harris' new songs examining life from her perspective at 64. Married and divorced three times, she sings with more surprise than lament in "Nobody" and "Lonely Girl" about finding herself without a life partner at this point in life.
"No more teenage love," she says with an unforced grin. "Every time I do 'Love Hurts,' which I still do occasionally, I have to give a wry smile when I go 'I'm young/I know … .'" She sings the phrase, pauses, then adds a lightly defiant "I'm not" to the line from the Everly Brothers hit, which she famously covered in a duet with country-rock innovator Parsons in the early 1970s.
She also addresses her long-ago creative and romantic relationship with Parsons, who helped introduce the world to the angelic beauty of Harris' voice before he died at age 26 in 1973. His effect on her career was monumental, and the boost he gave her, musically and professionally, is something she's returned to dozens of musicians in the succeeding years.
"The Road," which serves as the album's opening track, brings an evenhanded understanding of what others might look at as tragic. "I couldn't save you, and no one was to blame," she sings.
She has alluded to Parsons over the years, notably in her 1985 concept album "The Ballad of Sally Rose," about a young singer making her way in the world. But "The Road" may be the most directly autobiographical song she's written about that time in her life, raising the question: Why now?
"The first lines just came out and from then on all I had to do was just tell the story," she says. "It just kind of fell out."
In the absence of motivation to write anything more on the subject of young love, she also turns her attention to issues that continue to capture her attention, as in "The Ballad of Emmett Till," her Dylan-esque recounting of the story of the African American teenager from Chicago who was killed in 1955 for speaking to a white woman on a trip to visit relatives in rural Mississippi.
The song points to her unwavering compassion throughout her career for the underdog, oppressed, the voiceless, the disenfranchised members of society, human or nonhuman. That's taken the form of the numerous benefits she's participated in, including those aiding land mine awareness campaigns, animal rescue and efforts to preserve and protect country music history.
She was a linchpin in the preservation of the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the home of the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 to 1974. The building came close to being leveled after the Opry moved its base from downtown Nashville to be part of the Opryland theme park.
Harris hasn't appeared in the upper reaches of the country sales charts in more than a decade.
She arrived in 1975 with her major-label debut album, "Pieces of the Sky," as both a rock-influenced rebel and a keeper of the country flame, recording tradition-minded material by the likes of Dolly Parton and the Louvin Brothers as well as genre-blind songs by Bruce Springsteen and the Beatles. She has championed the work of emerging talents including Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, Lucinda Williams, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle and Conor Oberst.
As the country establishment began turning a blind eye to artists 40 and older, Harris moved on musically, connecting with producer Daniel Lanois for her watershed 1995 album, "Wrecking Ball," which won the Grammy for contemporary folk album — one of 12 she's collected in various categories over the years — and opened a new sonic world for her, one closer to the work of U2 than country chart-toppers such as Faith Hill and Shania Twain.
"It's rare that an artist can do something like 'Wrecking Ball,' which was probably her 20th record, that is that much of a reinvention, that much of a leap of imagination, and possibly her greatest record up to that time," said David Bither, senior vice president of Nonesuch Records, the label that signed Harris five years after the release of "Wrecking Ball."
"Paul Simon has a new record out that is one of the strongest records of his career," Bither said. "Emmy is still making important albums. It's not as if as you get older you stop becoming relevant, and those great artists, those we've been privileged to be around 30 or 40 years, it is important to be able to have them."
After joining Nonesuch, she made another breakthrough with "Red Dirt Girl," in which the woman who'd spent the previous quarter-century solidifying her reputation as one of the premier vocal interpreters in modern country suddenly blossomed as a songwriter, something she'd done to that point only sporadically, if impressively, on "Boulder to Birmingham" from the early "Pieces of the Sky."
What happened?
"I kind of got my marching orders from Daniel Lanois and [revered Texas singer-songwriter] Guy Clark at the same time," she says. "After 'Wrecking Ball,' Dan said, 'You need to write for your next record.' Shortly after that, Guy — I was sitting across from them at their house one Christmas, with Rodney — and he said, 'You need to write your next record, and I don't care if it takes you five years.' And it did — it took me five years. But then I thought, 'OK, I have written, and I can at least try,' so that's what I did.
"The other thing was, I wanted to follow through. 'Wrecking Ball' was such a revelation to me: the sound and the intense emotion of the music, and I knew I wanted to keep in that sonic world. But I also knew the price you had to pay for that — because you have to make sacrifices to the music gods — was that I needed to bring something new to the table. … I don't play an instrument, I couldn't become a jazz singer; this is the voice that I have. So the only thing I could bring to the table was my own song."
She wrote or co-wrote 11 of the 13 songs on "Hard Bargain," looking outside only for the title track, by Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith, and producer Jay Joyce's "Cross Yourself," both spiritually attuned songs.
Of Sexsmith's song, she says, "I heard it, I don't want to say as a spiritual, but I didn't hear it as a love song. Although I think it can be about a particular person, whether it's about a lover or a close friend, to me it was about the thing that keeps pulling us back into the world."
"I just turned 64," she says with more than a small tone of disbelief in her voice. "You remember back when the Beatles sang that and you thought, 'I'll never be 64.' It was like it was the end of the world. Now, it's not young, it's not old, it just is. So you're in that moment.
"I think one of the keys to any kind of peace in the world is to live in the moment. I guess that's why I love dogs so much, because they are so in the moment. They just keep bringing you back to that."
randy.lewis@latimes.com
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times
By Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/
April 24, 2011
NASHVILLE —— Emmylou Harris is trailed by a ragtag parade of eager dogs when she answers a knock at the door of the comfortable two-story home on a fenceless parcel a few miles from downtown Nashville, where she lives with her 89-year-old mother, Eugenia.
The singer and songwriter greets a visitor with the same unguarded openness with which she has welcomed in a steady stream of abandoned, abused or otherwise homeless canines as part of the Bonaparte's Retreat animal rescue operation she's run for the last several years.
One of them, Bella, is a large, gentle mutt who is the subject of "Big Black Dog," one of the songs from Harris' forthcoming album "Hard Bargain," her first in nearly three years. It's a lighthearted yet sincere ode to the loyalty and unconditional love that she prizes about her work with her animal companions.
"We probably give them too many human qualities, but they inhabit a world we might never understand. That's one of the reasons they can help us be more human," she says, settling into a small sofa in an upstairs bedroom she's converted into a music room. It's one of a couple of spaces at home where she likes to write.
Sheets of paper with lyrics are nearby on a music stand, a raft of guitars rest a few feet away, poised to assist when inspiration strikes. The walls around the stairway that leads to her workspace are adorned with family photos; inside her office are framed pictures and artwork of a smattering of the musicians — Johnny Cash and June Carter, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Gram Parsons — she's worked with over a recording career that now spans more than four decades since her largely unheralded debut album, "Gliding Bird," yet another animal allusion in her long, distinguished career.
"From the time you're born until the end of your life, I think they are our dearest companions," says Harris, her white-silver hair pulled up through a black scrunchie into a pony tail. She's wearing a comfortable black sweater, stylish scarf and knockabout thick black pants on a cool spring day during which the area is under the specter of tornado warnings.
An interaction with an animal is far less complicated than a relationship with another human. The latter are at the heart of Harris' new songs examining life from her perspective at 64. Married and divorced three times, she sings with more surprise than lament in "Nobody" and "Lonely Girl" about finding herself without a life partner at this point in life.
"No more teenage love," she says with an unforced grin. "Every time I do 'Love Hurts,' which I still do occasionally, I have to give a wry smile when I go 'I'm young/I know … .'" She sings the phrase, pauses, then adds a lightly defiant "I'm not" to the line from the Everly Brothers hit, which she famously covered in a duet with country-rock innovator Parsons in the early 1970s.
She also addresses her long-ago creative and romantic relationship with Parsons, who helped introduce the world to the angelic beauty of Harris' voice before he died at age 26 in 1973. His effect on her career was monumental, and the boost he gave her, musically and professionally, is something she's returned to dozens of musicians in the succeeding years.
"The Road," which serves as the album's opening track, brings an evenhanded understanding of what others might look at as tragic. "I couldn't save you, and no one was to blame," she sings.
She has alluded to Parsons over the years, notably in her 1985 concept album "The Ballad of Sally Rose," about a young singer making her way in the world. But "The Road" may be the most directly autobiographical song she's written about that time in her life, raising the question: Why now?
"The first lines just came out and from then on all I had to do was just tell the story," she says. "It just kind of fell out."
In the absence of motivation to write anything more on the subject of young love, she also turns her attention to issues that continue to capture her attention, as in "The Ballad of Emmett Till," her Dylan-esque recounting of the story of the African American teenager from Chicago who was killed in 1955 for speaking to a white woman on a trip to visit relatives in rural Mississippi.
The song points to her unwavering compassion throughout her career for the underdog, oppressed, the voiceless, the disenfranchised members of society, human or nonhuman. That's taken the form of the numerous benefits she's participated in, including those aiding land mine awareness campaigns, animal rescue and efforts to preserve and protect country music history.
She was a linchpin in the preservation of the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the home of the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 to 1974. The building came close to being leveled after the Opry moved its base from downtown Nashville to be part of the Opryland theme park.
Harris hasn't appeared in the upper reaches of the country sales charts in more than a decade.
She arrived in 1975 with her major-label debut album, "Pieces of the Sky," as both a rock-influenced rebel and a keeper of the country flame, recording tradition-minded material by the likes of Dolly Parton and the Louvin Brothers as well as genre-blind songs by Bruce Springsteen and the Beatles. She has championed the work of emerging talents including Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, Lucinda Williams, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle and Conor Oberst.
As the country establishment began turning a blind eye to artists 40 and older, Harris moved on musically, connecting with producer Daniel Lanois for her watershed 1995 album, "Wrecking Ball," which won the Grammy for contemporary folk album — one of 12 she's collected in various categories over the years — and opened a new sonic world for her, one closer to the work of U2 than country chart-toppers such as Faith Hill and Shania Twain.
"It's rare that an artist can do something like 'Wrecking Ball,' which was probably her 20th record, that is that much of a reinvention, that much of a leap of imagination, and possibly her greatest record up to that time," said David Bither, senior vice president of Nonesuch Records, the label that signed Harris five years after the release of "Wrecking Ball."
"Paul Simon has a new record out that is one of the strongest records of his career," Bither said. "Emmy is still making important albums. It's not as if as you get older you stop becoming relevant, and those great artists, those we've been privileged to be around 30 or 40 years, it is important to be able to have them."
After joining Nonesuch, she made another breakthrough with "Red Dirt Girl," in which the woman who'd spent the previous quarter-century solidifying her reputation as one of the premier vocal interpreters in modern country suddenly blossomed as a songwriter, something she'd done to that point only sporadically, if impressively, on "Boulder to Birmingham" from the early "Pieces of the Sky."
What happened?
"I kind of got my marching orders from Daniel Lanois and [revered Texas singer-songwriter] Guy Clark at the same time," she says. "After 'Wrecking Ball,' Dan said, 'You need to write for your next record.' Shortly after that, Guy — I was sitting across from them at their house one Christmas, with Rodney — and he said, 'You need to write your next record, and I don't care if it takes you five years.' And it did — it took me five years. But then I thought, 'OK, I have written, and I can at least try,' so that's what I did.
"The other thing was, I wanted to follow through. 'Wrecking Ball' was such a revelation to me: the sound and the intense emotion of the music, and I knew I wanted to keep in that sonic world. But I also knew the price you had to pay for that — because you have to make sacrifices to the music gods — was that I needed to bring something new to the table. … I don't play an instrument, I couldn't become a jazz singer; this is the voice that I have. So the only thing I could bring to the table was my own song."
She wrote or co-wrote 11 of the 13 songs on "Hard Bargain," looking outside only for the title track, by Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith, and producer Jay Joyce's "Cross Yourself," both spiritually attuned songs.
Of Sexsmith's song, she says, "I heard it, I don't want to say as a spiritual, but I didn't hear it as a love song. Although I think it can be about a particular person, whether it's about a lover or a close friend, to me it was about the thing that keeps pulling us back into the world."
"I just turned 64," she says with more than a small tone of disbelief in her voice. "You remember back when the Beatles sang that and you thought, 'I'll never be 64.' It was like it was the end of the world. Now, it's not young, it's not old, it just is. So you're in that moment.
"I think one of the keys to any kind of peace in the world is to live in the moment. I guess that's why I love dogs so much, because they are so in the moment. They just keep bringing you back to that."
randy.lewis@latimes.com
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times
Sunday, April 24, 2011
A Life Digging for Veins of Gold
By JON PARELES
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
April 24, 2011
AUSTIN, Tex.
EMMYLOU HARRIS summed up her attitude toward songwriting in one word. “It’s terrifying,” she said over coffee after a morning radio appearance during last month’s South by Southwest music festival. “It’s just this enormous blank page.”
Her new album, “Hard Bargain” (Nonesuch), due for release this week, is suffused with kindly intimacy, acknowledging sorrows and reaching past them. It is one of only three of her albums for which Ms. Harris wrote the majority of the songs by herself: “Red Dirt Girl” in 2000, “Stumble Into Grace” in 2003 and now “Hard Bargain.” (She also wrote the bulk of her 1985 album “The Ballad of Sally Rose” together with her husband at the time, the songwriter Paul Kennerley.) For the rest of more than two dozen albums since 1969 — and singing harmony with Gram Parsons, Roy Orbison, Willie Nelson, Dave Matthews, Elvis Costello, Gillian Welch and Bright Eyes, among others — Ms. Harris has been an interpreter, lending her slender but tangy and determined voice to venerable songs and brand-new ones.
During SXSW, Ms. Harris played a full slate of private and public showcases, previewing “Hard Bargain.” The radio performance was in a hotel ballroom for a large live audience, and Ms. Harris was dressed as a sweetheart of the rodeo, from cowboy boots and bluejeans to a lace-patterned top and a black cowgirl hat atop her proud mane of silvery hair. Coffee and performing adrenaline made her voluble; she usually sticks to tea. “Someone who’s been on the road for 40 years — that’s me,” said Ms. Harris, who turned 64 this month. “I have spent a good deal of my life out there, and I have no regrets.”
Born in Alabama, raised in Virginia, a longtime resident of California and then of Nashville, Ms. Harris has transformed her music repeatedly. During the 1970s and ’80s, through a string of gold albums, she sang honky-tonk, rockabilly, bluegrass and country-folk as a sly traditionalist; she could illuminate country standards, yet also make a pop song from the Beatles or Donna Summer seem to sprout Southern roots. When she shared harmonies with two other country-rooted, pop-savvy women — Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton — on the 1987 album “Trio,” it sold a million copies.
But in the early ’90s, country radio stonewalled her album “Cowgirl’s Prayer,” Ms. Harris said, relegating her to the limbo of older performers. Ms. Harris decided to shake up her routine. She told her label that she had been listening to music from Daniel Lanois, the resonance-loving producer of U2 and Peter Gabriel. “Somebody made a phone call,” and he was producing her.
The album they made, “Wrecking Ball” in 1995, introduced a new Ms. Harris, sounding more haunted and weathered, temporarily free of country trappings. But it, too, was a collection of other people’s songs, and afterward Mr. Lanois urged her to write her next album herself. By 1999 she had gotten up the nerve to fill an album with her own songs.
“I’d been treading water and didn’t even realize it,” she said. “Sometimes you have to just go and look completely in a different direction and completely change your environment to break up your logjam.”
“Hard Bargain” is the work of a songwriter thinking not only about herself but also about generations: mentors and ancestors, friends living and dead, children and grandchildren, mortality and faith.
“You get to a certain age when the life that has preceded you is going be longer than what is ahead of you,” she said. “You just accept it — this is where you are at this point in your life. It wasn’t like there was a theme in my head when I sat down to write. The ideas came out of what was happening in my world.”
She recorded “Hard Bargain” in the West Nashville home studio of her producer, Jay Joyce. Although Ms. Harris’s albums are generally full of guests — many of them returning favors for her backing vocals — the only performers on “Hard Bargain” are Ms. Harris, Mr. Joyce on guitars and keyboards and Giles Reaves on drums and keyboards.
Still, the songs aren’t spartan; multiple guitars and keyboards gleam, from the twinkling folk-pop of “Hard Bargain” (a Ron Sexsmith song) to the rockabilly twang of “Six White Cadillacs,” which treats death as a break from the road: “We won’t have to wander anymore.”
A mournful lullaby, “Goodnight Old World,” looks to a newborn child to “soften the sorrow” of “this sad world”; Ms. Harris now has a young granddaughter. The song was written with Will Jennings, known for collaborating on Steve Winwood songs like “Higher Love.” By telephone from his home in Santa Barbara, Calif., Mr. Jennings said: “I get inspired by voices, and when one comes forth so honestly and beautifully as hers, it really puts you on your mark as far as the words and the music. They have got to be true.”
Like many of Ms. Harris’s songs, “Goodnight Old World” hints at biblical phrases. “She and I both come out of the Southern culture,” said Mr. Jennings, who was born in Texas. “There’s always a hymn not too far away.”
The album includes “Darlin’ Kate,” an elegy to Kate McGarrigle of the McGarrigle sisters, who shared vocal harmonies and songwriting with Ms. Harris on “Stumble Into Grace” and many other occasions; its modest banjo and piano backup recall the McGarrigles’ parlor songs. Another elegy is “My Name Is Emmett Till,” telling the story of the 14-year-old boy brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955. Ms. Harris’s account mourns the life that Till never got to live, imagining his next generation: “Perhaps to be a father/With a black boy of my own.” There’s a third elegy as well: “The Road,” one of Ms. Harris’s many songs about the turning point of her life, singing with the country songwriter and Byrds member Gram Parsons, who died in 1973. Its chorus, she said, dates back to the ’60s, before she met Parsons; it had lingered in her memory. “I don’t write that many songs,” she said.
The album also includes “The Ship on His Arm,” a waltzing wartime romance. Its story was suggested by the lives of Ms. Harris’s parents, Walter and Eugenia, who married during World War II. He was a Marine.
“They had one of the great love stories of all time,” Ms. Harris said. “He goes off to war, she has my brother, he comes back and then they settle down to what they think will be a normal life, and the Korean conflict breaks out. I’m 5 years old, he goes off to war again, and his plane is shot down as soon as he gets over there. And for three months we don’t even know if he’s dead or alive. My mother lives through all of that.”
Her father was a prisoner of war who was tortured, but he returned to raise a family that Ms. Harris called “this wonderful nest of support and love.”
Only when she forced herself to take a kind of sabbatical could Ms. Harris concentrate on writing. “I just shut down,” she said, “and get up in the morning and shut myself off like Rapunzel with a big pile of straw and try to come up with the gold.”
Two of the most telling songs on “Hard Bargain” are about solitary women: “Nobody,” tracing the life of someone who never finds “her one true love,” and “Lonely Girl”: “If love can’t find me again/I’ll put it all behind me then,” she sings, “I’ll just go and learn to sing another sad love song.”
The melancholy in her songs sometimes surprises Ms. Harris. “I don’t believe in this idea that we’re going to be happy, happy people all the time and if we don’t we’re going to take a pill, or the idea that being melancholy or being sad is an unnatural state. But I actually have a pretty good life, and I’m a pretty upbeat person for the most part.”
Her next few years are mapped out: more touring, a long-delayed duo album with the songwriter Rodney Crowell, other collaborations. Then, perhaps, she’ll get around to writing more songs. “I still don’t know if I have a craft,” she said. “I just bumble through it and hope for the inspiration.”
Emmylou Harris takes measure of her musical life with ‘Hard Bargain’
Posted on April 24, 2011 by Peter Cooper
The Tennessean
http://www.tennessean.com/
There’s a point in “The Road,” Emmylou Harris’ rumination on her brief but transformative time with late, great Americana forerunner Gram Parsons, where the mournfulness might threaten to overwhelm.
The leadoff track to a new album titled Hard Bargain (out April 26), “The Road” finds Harris depicting Parsons as the impetus for her life in music. But that life, while well celebrated with honors such as her induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, has necessarily been one of unease. As she puts it in the song, “I have spent my whole life out here working on the blues.”
But that line isn’t meant to sound self-pitying — it’s something of a nod, both to her work ethic (“I don’t take vacations,” she says) and to another late and great troubadour friend, Townes Van Zandt. It was Van Zandt who explained with a forthright whimsy that there are but two kinds of music, “The blues and zip-a-dee-doo-dah.” The blues, then, stands as the good kind, and it can’t be made without labor, taste and soul.
“That song is a ‘Thank you,’ ” Harris says. “It’s looking back and being grateful that you ran into that person and your life was changed, and all the good things that have come to you from being on that path. I’ve had wonderful company along the way.”
Hard Bargain focuses in part on what happens when that company exits for other environs. Alongside “The Road,” with its memories of the early 1970s days when Parsons enlisted a then-unknown Harris to sing harmonies on two albums and on tour, there’s “Darling Kate,” about Harris’ friend and frequent collaborator Kate McGarrigle, who died in 2010 from a rare form of cancer. But the album is also greatly informed by new company, in the form of Nashville’s Jay Joyce, who played numerous instruments and produced the album.
For Joyce, the challenge of adding a new chapter to a Hall of Fame career — which includes 27 previous albums helmed by the heralded likes of Brian Ahern, Daniel Lanois, Richard Bennett, Paul Kennerley and Malcolm Burn — well, the whole thing seemed at the very least significant.
“It was a little daunting,” says Joyce, who first met Harris when he was producing Patty Griffin’s 1998 album Flaming Red. “And I still have to pinch myself once in a while if I’m in her living room, playing Gram Parsons’ guitar or the banjo Chet Atkins gave her. But she felt comfortable in my studio, and after a week or two you’re just friends making music. And Emmylou is very much a musician. She speaks the language.”
‘We kept it in the family’
Joyce and Harris made the album with multi-instrumentalist Giles Reaves and no other musicians.
“We said, ‘If we feel we need to bring in other sounds, we will,’ ” Harris says. “There was no need, though. I loved everything Jay and Giles played, and so we just kept it in the family.”
The trio approach didn’t lead to a simple or stripped-down album, as Joyce and Reaves often overdubbed instrumental parts over the basic tracks, adding layers and, at times, an elegant pop sheen. But working without Harris’ favored harmony singers such as Griffin, Buddy and Julie Miller, Pam Rose or Mary Ann Kennedy meant that Harris spent hours singing harmony over her own leads.
“I just think she’s one of the best background vocalists alive,” Joyce says of Harris, who has contributed significant harmony parts to recordings from Parsons, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, George Jones, Johnny Cash and hundreds of others. “She has a way of never singing what would be the regular thing. Somehow she always knows how to twist it up and make it her own distinct thing.”
Harris’ songwriting is also a distinct thing, though it was not until a quarter century after her 1975 major-label debut that she recorded an entire album of originals. Her skills as a finder of songs and as an inventive interpreter long took public precedence over her songwriting, though along the way she penned gems including “Boulder to Birmingham,” “Tulsa Queen” and “Prayer In Open D.”
For 2008’s All I Intended To Be, she blended a handful of originals with compositions from Merle Haggard, Billy Joe Shaver, Mark Germino and others, but all but two of Hard Bargain’s songs (the title track from Ron Sexsmith and Joyce’s album-closing “Cross Yourself”) were written or co-written by Harris. The songs are woven together by poetic sensibility and by themes of loss, gratitude and yearning amid change, though she didn’t set out to write any sort of concept album.
“Sometimes the writing is a way to figure out exactly where you’re at,” says Harris, who turned 64 earlier this month. “You accept the fact that this is where you are, and you accept what happened before. And most of your life is behind you, but you still have a ways to go.”
Reach Peter Cooper at 615-259-8220 or pcooper@tennessean.com.
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
April 24, 2011
AUSTIN, Tex.
EMMYLOU HARRIS summed up her attitude toward songwriting in one word. “It’s terrifying,” she said over coffee after a morning radio appearance during last month’s South by Southwest music festival. “It’s just this enormous blank page.”
Her new album, “Hard Bargain” (Nonesuch), due for release this week, is suffused with kindly intimacy, acknowledging sorrows and reaching past them. It is one of only three of her albums for which Ms. Harris wrote the majority of the songs by herself: “Red Dirt Girl” in 2000, “Stumble Into Grace” in 2003 and now “Hard Bargain.” (She also wrote the bulk of her 1985 album “The Ballad of Sally Rose” together with her husband at the time, the songwriter Paul Kennerley.) For the rest of more than two dozen albums since 1969 — and singing harmony with Gram Parsons, Roy Orbison, Willie Nelson, Dave Matthews, Elvis Costello, Gillian Welch and Bright Eyes, among others — Ms. Harris has been an interpreter, lending her slender but tangy and determined voice to venerable songs and brand-new ones.
During SXSW, Ms. Harris played a full slate of private and public showcases, previewing “Hard Bargain.” The radio performance was in a hotel ballroom for a large live audience, and Ms. Harris was dressed as a sweetheart of the rodeo, from cowboy boots and bluejeans to a lace-patterned top and a black cowgirl hat atop her proud mane of silvery hair. Coffee and performing adrenaline made her voluble; she usually sticks to tea. “Someone who’s been on the road for 40 years — that’s me,” said Ms. Harris, who turned 64 this month. “I have spent a good deal of my life out there, and I have no regrets.”
Born in Alabama, raised in Virginia, a longtime resident of California and then of Nashville, Ms. Harris has transformed her music repeatedly. During the 1970s and ’80s, through a string of gold albums, she sang honky-tonk, rockabilly, bluegrass and country-folk as a sly traditionalist; she could illuminate country standards, yet also make a pop song from the Beatles or Donna Summer seem to sprout Southern roots. When she shared harmonies with two other country-rooted, pop-savvy women — Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton — on the 1987 album “Trio,” it sold a million copies.
But in the early ’90s, country radio stonewalled her album “Cowgirl’s Prayer,” Ms. Harris said, relegating her to the limbo of older performers. Ms. Harris decided to shake up her routine. She told her label that she had been listening to music from Daniel Lanois, the resonance-loving producer of U2 and Peter Gabriel. “Somebody made a phone call,” and he was producing her.
The album they made, “Wrecking Ball” in 1995, introduced a new Ms. Harris, sounding more haunted and weathered, temporarily free of country trappings. But it, too, was a collection of other people’s songs, and afterward Mr. Lanois urged her to write her next album herself. By 1999 she had gotten up the nerve to fill an album with her own songs.
“I’d been treading water and didn’t even realize it,” she said. “Sometimes you have to just go and look completely in a different direction and completely change your environment to break up your logjam.”
“Hard Bargain” is the work of a songwriter thinking not only about herself but also about generations: mentors and ancestors, friends living and dead, children and grandchildren, mortality and faith.
“You get to a certain age when the life that has preceded you is going be longer than what is ahead of you,” she said. “You just accept it — this is where you are at this point in your life. It wasn’t like there was a theme in my head when I sat down to write. The ideas came out of what was happening in my world.”
Still, the songs aren’t spartan; multiple guitars and keyboards gleam, from the twinkling folk-pop of “Hard Bargain” (a Ron Sexsmith song) to the rockabilly twang of “Six White Cadillacs,” which treats death as a break from the road: “We won’t have to wander anymore.”
A mournful lullaby, “Goodnight Old World,” looks to a newborn child to “soften the sorrow” of “this sad world”; Ms. Harris now has a young granddaughter. The song was written with Will Jennings, known for collaborating on Steve Winwood songs like “Higher Love.” By telephone from his home in Santa Barbara, Calif., Mr. Jennings said: “I get inspired by voices, and when one comes forth so honestly and beautifully as hers, it really puts you on your mark as far as the words and the music. They have got to be true.”
Like many of Ms. Harris’s songs, “Goodnight Old World” hints at biblical phrases. “She and I both come out of the Southern culture,” said Mr. Jennings, who was born in Texas. “There’s always a hymn not too far away.”
The album includes “Darlin’ Kate,” an elegy to Kate McGarrigle of the McGarrigle sisters, who shared vocal harmonies and songwriting with Ms. Harris on “Stumble Into Grace” and many other occasions; its modest banjo and piano backup recall the McGarrigles’ parlor songs. Another elegy is “My Name Is Emmett Till,” telling the story of the 14-year-old boy brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955. Ms. Harris’s account mourns the life that Till never got to live, imagining his next generation: “Perhaps to be a father/With a black boy of my own.” There’s a third elegy as well: “The Road,” one of Ms. Harris’s many songs about the turning point of her life, singing with the country songwriter and Byrds member Gram Parsons, who died in 1973. Its chorus, she said, dates back to the ’60s, before she met Parsons; it had lingered in her memory. “I don’t write that many songs,” she said.
The album also includes “The Ship on His Arm,” a waltzing wartime romance. Its story was suggested by the lives of Ms. Harris’s parents, Walter and Eugenia, who married during World War II. He was a Marine.
“They had one of the great love stories of all time,” Ms. Harris said. “He goes off to war, she has my brother, he comes back and then they settle down to what they think will be a normal life, and the Korean conflict breaks out. I’m 5 years old, he goes off to war again, and his plane is shot down as soon as he gets over there. And for three months we don’t even know if he’s dead or alive. My mother lives through all of that.”
Her father was a prisoner of war who was tortured, but he returned to raise a family that Ms. Harris called “this wonderful nest of support and love.”
Only when she forced herself to take a kind of sabbatical could Ms. Harris concentrate on writing. “I just shut down,” she said, “and get up in the morning and shut myself off like Rapunzel with a big pile of straw and try to come up with the gold.”
Two of the most telling songs on “Hard Bargain” are about solitary women: “Nobody,” tracing the life of someone who never finds “her one true love,” and “Lonely Girl”: “If love can’t find me again/I’ll put it all behind me then,” she sings, “I’ll just go and learn to sing another sad love song.”
The melancholy in her songs sometimes surprises Ms. Harris. “I don’t believe in this idea that we’re going to be happy, happy people all the time and if we don’t we’re going to take a pill, or the idea that being melancholy or being sad is an unnatural state. But I actually have a pretty good life, and I’m a pretty upbeat person for the most part.”
Her next few years are mapped out: more touring, a long-delayed duo album with the songwriter Rodney Crowell, other collaborations. Then, perhaps, she’ll get around to writing more songs. “I still don’t know if I have a craft,” she said. “I just bumble through it and hope for the inspiration.”
Emmylou Harris takes measure of her musical life with ‘Hard Bargain’
Posted on April 24, 2011 by Peter Cooper
The Tennessean
http://www.tennessean.com/
There’s a point in “The Road,” Emmylou Harris’ rumination on her brief but transformative time with late, great Americana forerunner Gram Parsons, where the mournfulness might threaten to overwhelm.
The leadoff track to a new album titled Hard Bargain (out April 26), “The Road” finds Harris depicting Parsons as the impetus for her life in music. But that life, while well celebrated with honors such as her induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, has necessarily been one of unease. As she puts it in the song, “I have spent my whole life out here working on the blues.”
But that line isn’t meant to sound self-pitying — it’s something of a nod, both to her work ethic (“I don’t take vacations,” she says) and to another late and great troubadour friend, Townes Van Zandt. It was Van Zandt who explained with a forthright whimsy that there are but two kinds of music, “The blues and zip-a-dee-doo-dah.” The blues, then, stands as the good kind, and it can’t be made without labor, taste and soul.
“That song is a ‘Thank you,’ ” Harris says. “It’s looking back and being grateful that you ran into that person and your life was changed, and all the good things that have come to you from being on that path. I’ve had wonderful company along the way.”
Hard Bargain focuses in part on what happens when that company exits for other environs. Alongside “The Road,” with its memories of the early 1970s days when Parsons enlisted a then-unknown Harris to sing harmonies on two albums and on tour, there’s “Darling Kate,” about Harris’ friend and frequent collaborator Kate McGarrigle, who died in 2010 from a rare form of cancer. But the album is also greatly informed by new company, in the form of Nashville’s Jay Joyce, who played numerous instruments and produced the album.
For Joyce, the challenge of adding a new chapter to a Hall of Fame career — which includes 27 previous albums helmed by the heralded likes of Brian Ahern, Daniel Lanois, Richard Bennett, Paul Kennerley and Malcolm Burn — well, the whole thing seemed at the very least significant.
“It was a little daunting,” says Joyce, who first met Harris when he was producing Patty Griffin’s 1998 album Flaming Red. “And I still have to pinch myself once in a while if I’m in her living room, playing Gram Parsons’ guitar or the banjo Chet Atkins gave her. But she felt comfortable in my studio, and after a week or two you’re just friends making music. And Emmylou is very much a musician. She speaks the language.”
‘We kept it in the family’
Joyce and Harris made the album with multi-instrumentalist Giles Reaves and no other musicians.
“We said, ‘If we feel we need to bring in other sounds, we will,’ ” Harris says. “There was no need, though. I loved everything Jay and Giles played, and so we just kept it in the family.”
The trio approach didn’t lead to a simple or stripped-down album, as Joyce and Reaves often overdubbed instrumental parts over the basic tracks, adding layers and, at times, an elegant pop sheen. But working without Harris’ favored harmony singers such as Griffin, Buddy and Julie Miller, Pam Rose or Mary Ann Kennedy meant that Harris spent hours singing harmony over her own leads.
“I just think she’s one of the best background vocalists alive,” Joyce says of Harris, who has contributed significant harmony parts to recordings from Parsons, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, George Jones, Johnny Cash and hundreds of others. “She has a way of never singing what would be the regular thing. Somehow she always knows how to twist it up and make it her own distinct thing.”
Harris’ songwriting is also a distinct thing, though it was not until a quarter century after her 1975 major-label debut that she recorded an entire album of originals. Her skills as a finder of songs and as an inventive interpreter long took public precedence over her songwriting, though along the way she penned gems including “Boulder to Birmingham,” “Tulsa Queen” and “Prayer In Open D.”
For 2008’s All I Intended To Be, she blended a handful of originals with compositions from Merle Haggard, Billy Joe Shaver, Mark Germino and others, but all but two of Hard Bargain’s songs (the title track from Ron Sexsmith and Joyce’s album-closing “Cross Yourself”) were written or co-written by Harris. The songs are woven together by poetic sensibility and by themes of loss, gratitude and yearning amid change, though she didn’t set out to write any sort of concept album.
“Sometimes the writing is a way to figure out exactly where you’re at,” says Harris, who turned 64 earlier this month. “You accept the fact that this is where you are, and you accept what happened before. And most of your life is behind you, but you still have a ways to go.”
Reach Peter Cooper at 615-259-8220 or pcooper@tennessean.com.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Today's Tune: Emmylou Harris - Goin' Back to Harlan (Live 2008)
(Click on title to play video)
Goin' Back to Harlan
(Anna McCarrigle)
There where no cuckoos, no sycamores
We played about the forest floor
Underneath the silver maples, the balsams and the sky
We popped the heads off dandelions
Assuming roles from nursery rhymes
Rested on the riverbank
And grew up by and by, and grew up by and by
Frail my heart apart
And play me a little shady grove
Ring the bells of rhymney
Till they ring inside my head forever
Bounce the bow, rock the gallows
For the hangman's reel
And wake the devil from his dream
I'm going back to Harlan
I'm going back to Harlan
I'm going back to Harlan
And if you were Willie Moore
And I was Barbara Allen
Or Fair Ellen all sad at the cabin door
A-weepin' and a-pinin', for love
A-weepin' and a-pinin', for love
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
Her Career Seems a Rebuke to Contemporary Country
CULTURAL CONVERSATION
By JIM FUSILLI
The Wall Street Journal
June 19, 2008; Page D7
Nashville: Emmylou Harris is treating me to a visit to the Country Music Hall of Fame and moves directly to "the well from which it all springs," as she put it, Maybelle Carter's big-bodied 1928 Gibson L-5 guitar. We study, in the next display case, the most famous mandolin in American music history, the 1923 Gibson F-5 that belonged to bluegrass legend Bill Monroe, a friend and mentor of Ms. Harris until his death in 1996. When we're invited behind the scenes, we see materials for a coming Kitty Wells exhibition spread on a table, but Ms. Harris's eye is drawn to a mustard-yellow guitar that Ira Louvin built, placed near an original copy of his only solo album.
Getty Images
Musician Emmylou Harris performs during the Stagecoach Music Festival last May in Indio, Calif.
By showing me these seminal instruments, the wispy, silver-haired 61-year-old is commenting, however inadvertently, on her 35-year career -- as well as on her induction into the Hall of Fame in April and on her album "All I Intended to Be" (Nonesuch), issued earlier this month. Ms. Harris delivers her songs with Mother Carter's passion and unadorned directness; knows that Monroe's musical adventurism trumps the homogeneous sound of contemporary country; and in the early 1970s, with Gram Parsons, studied the Louvins' vocal harmonies.
Her new disc features "She Could Sing the Wildwood Flower," co-written with Kate and Anna McGarrigle, which references the Carter Family hit "Wildwood Flower." Monroe compositions have been part of her sprawling repertoire, and her first solo hit was a cover of the Louvin Brothers' "If I Could Only Win Your Love."
Not that Ms. Harris has always been deeply steeped in country music. As a young folk singer, she'd toss in a few country tunes in her shows -- "tongue in cheek, I have to admit," she told me. She was performing Wells's "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels" in a Washington, D.C., club when members of the Flying Burritos Brothers were in the audience. They told their former colleague Parsons about her, and he hired her to sing harmony for his first solo album, "GP." She said Parsons taught her to respect a country song.
"There's something about country music where you lock in with the words and you lock in with the melody and you let the song carry you," she said, which is a pretty fair description of her approach on "All I Intended to Be," a lovely, somber disc that made its debut on the country charts at No. 4 and on the pop charts at No. 22, the highest debuts of her career.
Parsons' death from a drug overdose in 1973 "came as a shock," Ms. Harris told me as we neared a case holding his Nudie suit festooned with images of pills and marijuana leaves. "I thought he was on his way to reclaiming himself." Back in Washington, she started her own group, playing country, pop and rock. "It was the first time I ever fronted a band," she said. "I was terrified for the first half of the first song, but I don't think I've been nervous since."
Ms. Harris issued two albums in 1975 -- "Pieces of the Sky" and "Elite Hotel" -- that foreshadowed her career, placing country classics alongside songs by pop writers and Nashville newcomers. Her affinity for pop has given her career a second track as a harmony vocalist and co-partner to some of rock's elite. Neil Young hired her in 1975, beginning a long and fruitful relationship. Bob Dylan brought her in for his "Desire" album. "I found out later that he just wanted a girl," she told me. "He didn't know who I was." Recently, she performed with Elvis Costello and Mark Knopfler.
Her varied career also comprises two hit albums of pop standards with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt titled "Trio" and "Trio II," a bluegrass phase, a prominent appearance on the "O Brother, Where Art Thou" soundtrack, and some innovative music with producer Daniel Lanois, including the gorgeous 1995 release "Wrecking Ball." Her two solo albums that preceded "All I Intended to Be" -- "Red Dirt Girl" and "Stumble Into Grace" -- skew toward the experimental folk-rock sound she developed with Mr. Lanois and his colleague Malcolm Burn, who produced both discs.
Zina Saunders
Her new album is a blend of country and folk. Ms. Harris composed three of its songs and co-wrote two others with the McGarrigles. The rest of the songs she's been saving for years -- compositions by Merle Haggard, Billy Joe Shaver, Jack Wesley Routh, Tracy Chapman and others. She first heard Mark Germino's "Broken Man's Lament" 25 years ago. "I've been a song finder for most of my career," she said. "The song is the gemstone and everything else is the setting."
After leaving the Hall of Fame, we drive to her white-columned house, built in 1926. She apologizes for the chaos in the kitchen, but its disarray suggests family life. A niece greets us with news of Ms. Harris's mother, who's recovering upstairs from a fall. Ms. Harris takes me to meet her dogs, Bella and Keeta, and to show me the headquarters of Bonaparte's Retreat, her organization that provides foster care to shelter dogs facing euthanasia. We settle in a cozy parlor filled with family photos and a scattering of memorabilia. None of her gold or platinum albums is in sight.
For "All I Intended to Be," Ms. Harris reunited in the studio with her ex-husband Brian Ahern, who produced her first 11 albums, and old friends John Starling, Tom Gray and Mike Auldridge, whom she's known since the early 1970s; Ms. Parton and Vince Gill, who sing harmony; and keyboard player Glen D. Hardin, who was on her early albums. But loss is the album's theme.
"From a very young age, I was always attracted to songs about loss, and I don't know why," she said. "I had the happiest childhood. My parents were wonderful." She pointed out that romantic heartbreak is addressed in only one tune -- Patty Griffin's "Moon Song." "Most of them are about growing older, and the inevitability of death. And yet," she said, "I don't think of myself as a sad person. . . . When it's all said and done, we're going to lose the people we love." But, she added, to understand that is to embrace life. "It's about living."
Her new album's personal statement, and its organic underpinning that at times harkens back to the acoustic sound of the Carter Family and folk music, seems a rebuke to contemporary country, whose stars seem more like actors playing singers than people relating genuine experiences. As we wound up our conversation -- she was awaiting a phone call from Mr. Costello and then would hop on the bus with Bella, Keeta and her band to resume a U.S. tour that runs through July -- I asked Ms. Harris if her career would be possible if she were starting out in Nashville now. "I don't think so," she said after a moment's thought. "I came at exactly the right time. But right now, I just can't imagine it."
"It could be that country as we knew it is gone," she added. "But the great thing about the Country Music Hall of Fame is you can trace it back."
That's the great thing about Ms. Harris too. Through her music, we find the roots of country.
Mr. Fusilli is the Journal's rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com.
By JIM FUSILLI
The Wall Street Journal
June 19, 2008; Page D7
Nashville: Emmylou Harris is treating me to a visit to the Country Music Hall of Fame and moves directly to "the well from which it all springs," as she put it, Maybelle Carter's big-bodied 1928 Gibson L-5 guitar. We study, in the next display case, the most famous mandolin in American music history, the 1923 Gibson F-5 that belonged to bluegrass legend Bill Monroe, a friend and mentor of Ms. Harris until his death in 1996. When we're invited behind the scenes, we see materials for a coming Kitty Wells exhibition spread on a table, but Ms. Harris's eye is drawn to a mustard-yellow guitar that Ira Louvin built, placed near an original copy of his only solo album.
Getty Images
Musician Emmylou Harris performs during the Stagecoach Music Festival last May in Indio, Calif.
By showing me these seminal instruments, the wispy, silver-haired 61-year-old is commenting, however inadvertently, on her 35-year career -- as well as on her induction into the Hall of Fame in April and on her album "All I Intended to Be" (Nonesuch), issued earlier this month. Ms. Harris delivers her songs with Mother Carter's passion and unadorned directness; knows that Monroe's musical adventurism trumps the homogeneous sound of contemporary country; and in the early 1970s, with Gram Parsons, studied the Louvins' vocal harmonies.
Her new disc features "She Could Sing the Wildwood Flower," co-written with Kate and Anna McGarrigle, which references the Carter Family hit "Wildwood Flower." Monroe compositions have been part of her sprawling repertoire, and her first solo hit was a cover of the Louvin Brothers' "If I Could Only Win Your Love."
Not that Ms. Harris has always been deeply steeped in country music. As a young folk singer, she'd toss in a few country tunes in her shows -- "tongue in cheek, I have to admit," she told me. She was performing Wells's "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels" in a Washington, D.C., club when members of the Flying Burritos Brothers were in the audience. They told their former colleague Parsons about her, and he hired her to sing harmony for his first solo album, "GP." She said Parsons taught her to respect a country song.
"There's something about country music where you lock in with the words and you lock in with the melody and you let the song carry you," she said, which is a pretty fair description of her approach on "All I Intended to Be," a lovely, somber disc that made its debut on the country charts at No. 4 and on the pop charts at No. 22, the highest debuts of her career.
Parsons' death from a drug overdose in 1973 "came as a shock," Ms. Harris told me as we neared a case holding his Nudie suit festooned with images of pills and marijuana leaves. "I thought he was on his way to reclaiming himself." Back in Washington, she started her own group, playing country, pop and rock. "It was the first time I ever fronted a band," she said. "I was terrified for the first half of the first song, but I don't think I've been nervous since."
Ms. Harris issued two albums in 1975 -- "Pieces of the Sky" and "Elite Hotel" -- that foreshadowed her career, placing country classics alongside songs by pop writers and Nashville newcomers. Her affinity for pop has given her career a second track as a harmony vocalist and co-partner to some of rock's elite. Neil Young hired her in 1975, beginning a long and fruitful relationship. Bob Dylan brought her in for his "Desire" album. "I found out later that he just wanted a girl," she told me. "He didn't know who I was." Recently, she performed with Elvis Costello and Mark Knopfler.
Her varied career also comprises two hit albums of pop standards with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt titled "Trio" and "Trio II," a bluegrass phase, a prominent appearance on the "O Brother, Where Art Thou" soundtrack, and some innovative music with producer Daniel Lanois, including the gorgeous 1995 release "Wrecking Ball." Her two solo albums that preceded "All I Intended to Be" -- "Red Dirt Girl" and "Stumble Into Grace" -- skew toward the experimental folk-rock sound she developed with Mr. Lanois and his colleague Malcolm Burn, who produced both discs.
Zina Saunders
Her new album is a blend of country and folk. Ms. Harris composed three of its songs and co-wrote two others with the McGarrigles. The rest of the songs she's been saving for years -- compositions by Merle Haggard, Billy Joe Shaver, Jack Wesley Routh, Tracy Chapman and others. She first heard Mark Germino's "Broken Man's Lament" 25 years ago. "I've been a song finder for most of my career," she said. "The song is the gemstone and everything else is the setting."
After leaving the Hall of Fame, we drive to her white-columned house, built in 1926. She apologizes for the chaos in the kitchen, but its disarray suggests family life. A niece greets us with news of Ms. Harris's mother, who's recovering upstairs from a fall. Ms. Harris takes me to meet her dogs, Bella and Keeta, and to show me the headquarters of Bonaparte's Retreat, her organization that provides foster care to shelter dogs facing euthanasia. We settle in a cozy parlor filled with family photos and a scattering of memorabilia. None of her gold or platinum albums is in sight.
For "All I Intended to Be," Ms. Harris reunited in the studio with her ex-husband Brian Ahern, who produced her first 11 albums, and old friends John Starling, Tom Gray and Mike Auldridge, whom she's known since the early 1970s; Ms. Parton and Vince Gill, who sing harmony; and keyboard player Glen D. Hardin, who was on her early albums. But loss is the album's theme.
"From a very young age, I was always attracted to songs about loss, and I don't know why," she said. "I had the happiest childhood. My parents were wonderful." She pointed out that romantic heartbreak is addressed in only one tune -- Patty Griffin's "Moon Song." "Most of them are about growing older, and the inevitability of death. And yet," she said, "I don't think of myself as a sad person. . . . When it's all said and done, we're going to lose the people we love." But, she added, to understand that is to embrace life. "It's about living."
Her new album's personal statement, and its organic underpinning that at times harkens back to the acoustic sound of the Carter Family and folk music, seems a rebuke to contemporary country, whose stars seem more like actors playing singers than people relating genuine experiences. As we wound up our conversation -- she was awaiting a phone call from Mr. Costello and then would hop on the bus with Bella, Keeta and her band to resume a U.S. tour that runs through July -- I asked Ms. Harris if her career would be possible if she were starting out in Nashville now. "I don't think so," she said after a moment's thought. "I came at exactly the right time. But right now, I just can't imagine it."
"It could be that country as we knew it is gone," she added. "But the great thing about the Country Music Hall of Fame is you can trace it back."
That's the great thing about Ms. Harris too. Through her music, we find the roots of country.
Mr. Fusilli is the Journal's rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com.
Emmylou Harris is charmed and charming
By David Menconi, Staff Writer
Raleigh News & Observer
June 20, 2008
Emmylou Harris has the sort of life and career that lesser mortals can only dream about. She moves in rarefied circles, gliding with seeming effortlessness from one incredibly cool project to the next. Recent years have found Harris touring, recording and singing with an array of big wheels including Mark Knopfler, Neil Young, Dolly Parton and Patty Griffin -- dear friends all. Harris was also inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame this past April.
Remarkably, all of this just seems to happen more or less on its own. A large part of that is Harris' voice, versatile and dulcet, which is a welcome addition to almost any musical context. But part of it also comes down to Harris herself, a universally beloved figure who seems to be proof that you get back what you put out into the world.
"It does seem to just kind of happen, yes," Harris says, calling from New York City. "I'm lucky that way. I'm not out there trying to drum up business, if you know what I mean. Like Mark Knopfler, who is so easy to sing with. He's really good friends with Paul Kennerley, my ex-husband, who is still like my best friend. So we ran in the same circles and it just sort of happened organically. It wasn't this music business thing of, 'Let's put these two together!' It started with him wanting me to sing a couple of songs on his album and grew from there."
Harris performs Wednesday in Raleigh at the N.C. Museum of Art, touring behind her just-released album "All I Intended to Be" (Nonesuch Records). That follows up her 2006 collaboration with Knopfler, "All the Roadrunning," on which Harris and the Dire Straits frontman conjure up vocal harmonies you just might not think possible.
Harris' angelic, lighter-than-air voice seems an odd match for Knopfler's gruff pub-rock bray, yet they fit together wonderfully. One has to wonder: Is there anybody Harris can't sing with?
"Oh, it usually works," she says with a laugh. "Sometimes it's better than others, of course. But usually you can come up with something that's at least ... interesting."
Singing with friends
Plenty of Harris' friends turn up on "All I Intended to Be," including Parton, the McGarrigle Sisters, Vince Gill, Buddy Miller (recently anointed "Artist of the Decade" by No Depression magazine) and John Starling from The Seldom Scene. Also back in the fold is producer Brian Ahern, Harris' former husband, who produced her first 11 albums in the 1970s and early '80s. This is their first full-length work together in 25 years.
"All I Intended to Be" gives a bit more prominence to acoustic instruments than has been typical for Harris in recent years. But for the most part, it continues in the vein of spectral, ethereal country-folk that Harris staked out with 1995's Daniel Lanois-produced "Wrecking Ball."
"I do think every producer puts a stamp on things," Harris says. "This might be more of a return to the simpler sound I had at the beginning. As everybody grows and changes, you add to your repertoire whether you're a singer or producer or songwriter. This is where Brian and I are at this point. But it wasn't any grand thing. We'd worked together off and on since the breakup. After the dust settled and we got to raising our daughter, certain projects would come up where I'd ask Brian for help. This was our first full project since then. Since we both live in Nashville, it just seemed like time."
Also serving an old-friend role are some of the songs on "All I Intended to Be" (a line from Billy Joe Shaver's "Old Five and Dimers Like Me"). The opening track, "Shores of White Sand," is a song Harris has had her eye on since Karen Brooks first recorded it in 1982. A few Harris originals are on the album, but most of the track list comes from other writers including Griffin, the McGarrigle Sisters, Tracy Chapman and Merle Haggard.
"I've been collecting songs for so long, I don't even know how I go about it anymore," Harris says. "It's just something I do, gather them up. I've always been a collector and coverer of songs. When I went to make this album, I didn't have a lot of songs written. Just a few. So I thought it was maybe time to address some of these gems I'd been meaning to get to."
'Like a shining star'
Particularly striking is "Broken Man's Lament," written and originally recorded by North Carolina native Mark Germino more than 20 years ago and a song Harris says is "like a shining star." It's a shatteringly tragic meditation on lost loves and wasted lives falling apart, narrated by a man whose stifled wife left him:
Now I live my life in silence,
Though I'm not quite in a shell.
I drink and listen to the song
"A Whiter Shade of Pale,"
Oh, "A Whiter Shade of Pale."
This doesn't seem like a song Harris could relate to. And yet she sells it.
"Well, it happens to everybody, doesn't it?" Harris says. "I have had a charmed life, but that doesn't mean I'm cut off from the universe and what people have to go through. That song is very specific in the details, but that doesn't keep you from being able to relate to it. I can relate to the mistakes one makes in relationships, including the other character who's not fully fleshed out but is definitely present, the wife.
"It's like telling a short story, reading aloud," she concludes. "Reading aloud is a lovely thing. Sometimes I'll read a passage aloud to myself if it's really stunning, to hear the sound of the words. But mostly, I read to our children. 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' is more my speed."
Info
Who: Emmylou Harris with Jimmy Gaudreau and Moondi Klein.
When: 8 p.m. Wednesday.
Where: N.C. Museum of Art, 2110 Blue Ridge Road, Raleigh.
Cost: $22-$45 ($12.50 for children 7-12, lawn only).
Details: 839-6262, ncartmuseum.org.
Raleigh News & Observer
June 20, 2008
Emmylou Harris has the sort of life and career that lesser mortals can only dream about. She moves in rarefied circles, gliding with seeming effortlessness from one incredibly cool project to the next. Recent years have found Harris touring, recording and singing with an array of big wheels including Mark Knopfler, Neil Young, Dolly Parton and Patty Griffin -- dear friends all. Harris was also inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame this past April.
Remarkably, all of this just seems to happen more or less on its own. A large part of that is Harris' voice, versatile and dulcet, which is a welcome addition to almost any musical context. But part of it also comes down to Harris herself, a universally beloved figure who seems to be proof that you get back what you put out into the world.
"It does seem to just kind of happen, yes," Harris says, calling from New York City. "I'm lucky that way. I'm not out there trying to drum up business, if you know what I mean. Like Mark Knopfler, who is so easy to sing with. He's really good friends with Paul Kennerley, my ex-husband, who is still like my best friend. So we ran in the same circles and it just sort of happened organically. It wasn't this music business thing of, 'Let's put these two together!' It started with him wanting me to sing a couple of songs on his album and grew from there."
Harris performs Wednesday in Raleigh at the N.C. Museum of Art, touring behind her just-released album "All I Intended to Be" (Nonesuch Records). That follows up her 2006 collaboration with Knopfler, "All the Roadrunning," on which Harris and the Dire Straits frontman conjure up vocal harmonies you just might not think possible.
Harris' angelic, lighter-than-air voice seems an odd match for Knopfler's gruff pub-rock bray, yet they fit together wonderfully. One has to wonder: Is there anybody Harris can't sing with?
"Oh, it usually works," she says with a laugh. "Sometimes it's better than others, of course. But usually you can come up with something that's at least ... interesting."
Singing with friends
Plenty of Harris' friends turn up on "All I Intended to Be," including Parton, the McGarrigle Sisters, Vince Gill, Buddy Miller (recently anointed "Artist of the Decade" by No Depression magazine) and John Starling from The Seldom Scene. Also back in the fold is producer Brian Ahern, Harris' former husband, who produced her first 11 albums in the 1970s and early '80s. This is their first full-length work together in 25 years.
"All I Intended to Be" gives a bit more prominence to acoustic instruments than has been typical for Harris in recent years. But for the most part, it continues in the vein of spectral, ethereal country-folk that Harris staked out with 1995's Daniel Lanois-produced "Wrecking Ball."
"I do think every producer puts a stamp on things," Harris says. "This might be more of a return to the simpler sound I had at the beginning. As everybody grows and changes, you add to your repertoire whether you're a singer or producer or songwriter. This is where Brian and I are at this point. But it wasn't any grand thing. We'd worked together off and on since the breakup. After the dust settled and we got to raising our daughter, certain projects would come up where I'd ask Brian for help. This was our first full project since then. Since we both live in Nashville, it just seemed like time."
Also serving an old-friend role are some of the songs on "All I Intended to Be" (a line from Billy Joe Shaver's "Old Five and Dimers Like Me"). The opening track, "Shores of White Sand," is a song Harris has had her eye on since Karen Brooks first recorded it in 1982. A few Harris originals are on the album, but most of the track list comes from other writers including Griffin, the McGarrigle Sisters, Tracy Chapman and Merle Haggard.
"I've been collecting songs for so long, I don't even know how I go about it anymore," Harris says. "It's just something I do, gather them up. I've always been a collector and coverer of songs. When I went to make this album, I didn't have a lot of songs written. Just a few. So I thought it was maybe time to address some of these gems I'd been meaning to get to."
'Like a shining star'
Particularly striking is "Broken Man's Lament," written and originally recorded by North Carolina native Mark Germino more than 20 years ago and a song Harris says is "like a shining star." It's a shatteringly tragic meditation on lost loves and wasted lives falling apart, narrated by a man whose stifled wife left him:
Now I live my life in silence,
Though I'm not quite in a shell.
I drink and listen to the song
"A Whiter Shade of Pale,"
Oh, "A Whiter Shade of Pale."
This doesn't seem like a song Harris could relate to. And yet she sells it.
"Well, it happens to everybody, doesn't it?" Harris says. "I have had a charmed life, but that doesn't mean I'm cut off from the universe and what people have to go through. That song is very specific in the details, but that doesn't keep you from being able to relate to it. I can relate to the mistakes one makes in relationships, including the other character who's not fully fleshed out but is definitely present, the wife.
"It's like telling a short story, reading aloud," she concludes. "Reading aloud is a lovely thing. Sometimes I'll read a passage aloud to myself if it's really stunning, to hear the sound of the words. But mostly, I read to our children. 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' is more my speed."
Info
Who: Emmylou Harris with Jimmy Gaudreau and Moondi Klein.
When: 8 p.m. Wednesday.
Where: N.C. Museum of Art, 2110 Blue Ridge Road, Raleigh.
Cost: $22-$45 ($12.50 for children 7-12, lawn only).
Details: 839-6262, ncartmuseum.org.
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