Pages tagged “emmylou harris”

Click above to watch "Not Enough" from Emmylou Harris' new record All I Intended to Be, out now on Nonesuch Records.

Related Links:
Review: Emmylou Harris - All I Intended to Be
News: Emmylou Harris prepares for new album, summer tour
Review: Emmylou Harris - Songbird: Rare Tracks and Forgotten Gems

The 1995 album Wrecking Ball towers as the Mount Everest of Emmylou Harris’ recording career. Before that, she was a very hip country neo-traditionalist—like Dwight Yoakam—with a connoisseur’s taste in folk music and rock ‘n’ roll, thanks to her internship with Gram Parsons. Following it, she was a white-haired pop goddess.

As Ben Gibbard ponders the meaning of life in our May issue, Brian Howe explores the nature of mother through the song lyrics of rap stars, indie rockers and, uh, Glen Danzig. Though the most important conclusion I drew from the piece is that I am really glad Danzig is not my son, it also reinforced for me the notion that, much like armpits, everybody has a mom—and like armpits, some people’s moms stink. Like, really stink—Ghostface Killah’s mom beat him for peeing the bed! Harsh, Mama Killah!

Quite unlike armpits, though, mothers are the subject of a few great songs. Iron & Wine’s “Upward Over the Mountain” and Smog’s “I Feel Like The Mother Of The World” are two of my favorites among the ones Howe mentions. Of course, it’s not just men that have immortalized and/or vilified their mothers in song. Plenty of female musicians have raised a musical glass to the women they came from (and may or may not, one day, become). Though lacking in Oedipal awkwardness, these songs still pack a punch.

Legendary Southern songbird Emmylou Harris will be hitting the road this summer for a North American tour.

Harris has already done some touring this year, first with Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin and Buddy Miller in January, and a month later as a headliner on the 2008 Cayamo Cruise. Her summer tour will be in support of her upcoming album, All I Intended To Be, due out June 10 on Nonesuch Records.

The new record is Harris’ first solo release since 2003’s Stumble Into Grace. The singer/songwriter recorded the new album over a four-year period with her longtime producer Brian Ahern at his studio in Nashville. All I Intended To Be will contain both original material and some of Harris’ all-time favorite songs, featuring guest vocals by Dolly Parton, Vince Gill and Buddy Miller.

In addition to preparing for the new album’s release, Harris was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame on Sunday. Country Music Association CEO Tammy Genovese said, "Harris possesses the voice of an angel. She is one of the most revered song interpreters on the planet, and has been instrumental in preserving country music’s past while expanding country music’s horizons throughout her career." We couldn’t agree more.

Harris’ summer tour kicks off May 23 in Monterey, Calif., and will also feature Jimmy Gaudreau and Moondi Klein.

Dates:

May
23 - Monterey, Calif. @ Golden State Theatre
24 - Sonora, Calif. @ Strawberry Music Festival
25 - Sparks, Nev. @ John Ascuaga's Nugget Hotel/Casino

June
6 - Morrison, Colo. @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre
8 - Lawrence, Kan. @ Wakarusa Festival
14 - Lisle, Ill. @ Morton Arboretum
16 - Toronto, Ont. @ Massey Hall
18 - New York, N.Y. @ Town Hall
19 - New York, N.Y. @ Town Hall
20 - Oyster Bay, N.Y. @ FOTA Pavilion At Planting Fields
22 - Vienna, Va. @ Filene Center At Wolf Trap
23 - Charlottesville, Va. @ Charlottesville Pavilion
25 - Raleigh, N.C. @ North Carolina Museum Of Art
27 - Atlanta, Ga. @ Chastain Park Amphitheatre

July
17 - Beaver Creek, Colo. @ Vilar Center For The Arts
19 - Alta, Wyo. @ Grand Targhee Festival
20 - Salt Lake City, Utah @ Red Butte Garden
22 - Portland, Ore. @ Oregon Zoo Amphitheatre
23 - Vancouver, B.C. @ Orpheum
24 - Seattle, Wash. @ Woodland Park Zoo
26 - San Francisco, Calif. @ Nob Hill Masonic Center
27 - Saratoga, Calif. @ The Mountain Winery
31 - San Diego, Calf. @ Humphrey's Concerts By The Bay

Related links:
EmmylouHarris.com
Emmylou Harris on MySpace
Feature: Emmylou Harris: Canines and Land Mines

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Who would you like to see join Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, John Hiatt, Shawn Colvin and more Paste-approved artists on the singer-songwriter cruise, Cayamo? Cast (no pun intended) your vote now and help these artists set sail. (Ok, pun intended.)

Twenty semi-finalists will be featured over the next two weeks, in two rounds of 10 artists. Rate each artist with 1-5 stars and submit your votes! Let your voice be heard. Five finalists will move on to a celebrity judges round, with the winner earning a spot aboard Cayamo.

Round 1 voting ends today. Round 1 artists are (in no particular order):

Ellery
Liz Tormes
Richard McGraw
Andy Mac
Bryce Harrison
Tova Rinah
The Bowmans
Chase Pagan
David Carn

Round 2 artists are (in no particular order):

Trent Dabbs
Kate York
Rachele Eve
John Austin
Carsie Blanton
Alyson Greenfield
Experimental Pilot
Casey Desmond
Maren Coleman
Kat Jones

To cast your vote, just visit this page.

Choice selections from reigning Queen of American Music's canon get second, glorious look

Great voices create civilizations. They sing, compose, interpret, collect and appropriate living words, offering them up in songs befitting the occasions, events and epochs in the stories they sing. The great voices lyricize reality. They tell us what happened, what’s going on, and how it all feels. As Shakespeare put it, they give to an otherwise airy nothingness a local habitation, a name and a way of looking at our own life together.

By now, no self-respecting listener of English-language music should require a persuasive word when it comes to the majesty of Emmylou Harris. Like Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, she is not of an age, but for all time. Now, with Songbird: Rare Tracks and Forgotten Gems, we’re made to understand that her awesome stature as a vocalist is part and parcel with her career as a lyrical archivist whose own songwriting is seamlessly connected to her role as a faithful steward of other people's songs. Her voice gives life to other voices, creating new contexts for people’s stories to be told. Her records make a record of the times. Her songs are a summons to research. Her music bears witness.

This 78-track retrospective, it must be said, is only the tip of the iceberg (one longs for her celebrated take on Donna Summer’s “On the Radio,” or Sinead O’Connor’s “This Is To Mother You”), but it’s the tip of the iceberg according to Emmylou. It’s as if the shifting logic and personnel of record companies finally gave light of day to the treasures with which they were entrusted. “Important gems in the string of pearls that each album strives to become,” Harris calls them.

Never programmed to practice the music of the country as “country music,” she was never made to do it “the right way,” as she puts it. This freed her to make music the way that felt right to her. Beginning with a 1969 recording of "Clocks," introducing us to the "funny little people dancing ’round my head,” we’re dropped into a wide-open space of democratic dignity where stirring renditions of The Louvin Brothers’ “Satan’s Jewel Crown” and Bruce Springsteen’s “My Father’s House” can reside next to live footage of a performance of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” She’s drawn to any and all primal longing, and Songbird covers a wide range of melancholy; all of it thick with human-interest stories.

Hearing “Prayer in Open D” or Julie Miller’s “All My Tears” (included here in the Spyboy versions) it’s odd to imagine Harris—as a very young woman who sang Dylan’s “To Ramona” over and over again—writing to Pete Seeger to share her fear that she’d known too little hardship to sing songs of lament and suffering with conviction. Seeger wrote her back and assured her that a hard time or two was likely just around the corner.

She credits Gram Parsons with giving her "whatever is unique in my voice" but the statement is belied by a moving version of Bill and Taffy Danoff's "Falling In A Deep Hole" (heretofore unreleased, Harris has no memory of the recording, but it predates her introduction to Parsons). Longtime listeners will also be overjoyed to hear a Daniel Lanois-produced version of “In The Garden,” originally recorded for the All The Pretty Horses soundtrack.

Like most musical luminaries whose work is associated with the country genre, the country-music industry has often responded to her best work with ambivalence at best and, at worst, blatant disregard. Back in 1975, long before “alt.country” became all the rage, Harris was recording Beatles songs and receiving a chilly critical response (“For No One” from Pieces of the Sky is included here). And while Nashville almost turned a blind eye to the proposed demolition of the historic Ryman Auditorium (now touted as the Mecca of country music), Harris recorded a live album there (“Get Up John” and “If I Could Be There” from 1992’s At The Ryman also appear). The record is widely credited with waking up Music City to its own legacy.

Songbird reminds us of the scope of Harris’ creativity and how it’s always connected to her magnanimity, her deep affections and her deep concerns. Great music always defies genres. It won’t be boundaried by marketing categories. And the big music of Emmylou includes Dolly Parton, Beck, George Jones, Chrissie Hynde, Linda Ronstadt, Steve Earle and Johnny Cash. The sad, sweet old cosmos she channels, song after song, continues to defy commodification.

"I've always thought of myself first and foremost as an interpreter," Emmylou Harris recently told Fader, regarding her upcoming box set of rare and unreleased tracks, Songbird, out Sept 18 on Rhino Records. She continued:

"[Cover songs have] been the lion's share of what I've done over the years. I don't want to say it's easier than writing, although the hard work is done in writing the song - that's where you really seat. But hen you've got a song that's pre-existing, like [Buck Owens's] "Together Again," it's almost like it's the jewel in the crown, and you're coming up with another setting for it. It's the people you gather around you, the musicians and what they're going to come up with - how they're going to polish that stone, so to speak. And I've always had incredible polishers around me. So I'm fascinated with the myriad ways in which a song can be done - and the message will be there in the interpretation.

Harris said that, unlike her previously released Best of from 2008, this project gave her a chance to gather "tracks that maybe didn't lend themselves to live performance, but were special moments in the studio." With help from co-producer James Austin, she assembled a collection of collaborations with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt (who called themselves the Queenston trio), as well as Patty Griffin, George Jones, Willie Nelson and Beck. Also included are covers of Lucindia Williams and Anna McGarrigle, as well as performances from her days with mentor and singing partner Gram Parsons.

"[Parsons] set me on that path, of finding my voice, and giving me a sense of structure," said Harris. "And that was the path that I followed - we could zig and zag, but we always had a center, and that center was coming from country."

Related links:
Emmylou.net
Emmylou Harris on MySpace
TheFader.com

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

Click here to return to the issue 33 cover story home page.

Emmylou Harris is no stranger to activism. After traveling to Cambodia and Vietnam in 1997 with Veterans For America president Bobby Muller—and seeing firsthand the devastation caused by mines in Southeast Asia—the 12-time Grammy winner launched the first Concert for a Landmine Free World. Held in Washington, D.C., the event featured Harris, Willie Nelson, Sheryl Crow, Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle. A series of subsequent concerts—as well as proceeds from the Gram Parsons tribute album she put together, The Return of the Grievous Angel—helped fund the VFA’s Nobel Prize-winning work. “We know chemical weapons might help in winning a war, but we decided that the price of chemical weapons is too high,” she told the Irish Independent in 2002. “Landmines need to be put in the same category. We have a higher standard of behavior in the world.”

Lately, however, her attention has turned elsewhere. “I’ve gotten very involved in dog rescue,” she says from her home in Nashville, “which I’m doing on a very local, homespun level here. That’s become kind of an increasing passion, and is consuming a lot of my time.”

In 2002, Harris built Bonaparte’s Retreat, a dog shelter in her backyard that rescues dogs scheduled for euthanasia at the Metro Nashville Animal Control. She’s found homes for several of the adopted dogs among friends and fans, and currently has five more available at Emmylou.net. The namesake Bonaparte was rescued from the Nashville Humane Association in 1991, and toured with Harris for years before his death. Now, two more rescued dogs, Keeta and Bella, accompany her on the tour bus. After Hurricane Katrina, Harris set up The Keeta Fund in support of the Humane Society’s disaster program for dislocated animals. “Animals can teach us how to be better humans,” she says. “They’ve certainly taught me that.”

For more information, visit Emmylou.net or hsus.org/keetafund.

[Above: Jesse Harris]

One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn't belong. Can you tell which thing is not like the others? By the time we finish this, uh, paragraph? Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Norah Jones, Cat Power, Bright Eyes, Jesse Harris, Feist, M. Ward, Hall and Oates, Brad Mehldau and The Black Keys. You have 30 seconds, so choose wisely.

All right, pencils down.

If you picked "Hall and Oates," then you answered correctly. But what do the other musicians have in common? All of them and a few others are featured in Ethan Hawke's latest film, The Hottest State. The soundtrack comes out via mysterious Sony imprint Hickory Records on August 7.

Jesse Harris wrote all the music for the film and co-executive produced the soundtrack with Hawke. Forming like Voltron, the pair handpicked the rather stellar musical cast that would cover his songs. Harris, who has been a friend of Hawke's since the early '90s, has released half a dozen albums as a solo artist, and is no stranger to other people playing his music. In fact, a certain famous songwriter on a certain soundtrack to a certain Ethan Hawke film took a song of his called "Don't Know Why" all the way to Hitsville in 2003. Harris won a Song of the Year Grammy for that one.

The Hottest State, which hits theaters August 24 via THINKFilm, is adapted from Hawke's novel of the same name. Starring (open up IMDB in another window, y'all!) Mark Webber (Broken Flowers), Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace), Laura Linney (Mystic River, The Squid and the Whale), Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain), Sonia Braga (Kiss of the Spider Woman), Hawke and Harris (who plays a small part), the film is described as a "bittersweet romance that distills the joy, pain, erotic highs, and emotional lows of first love." Nothing like getting high and erotic. Or, something.

Track listing for The Hottest State:
1. Rocha - "Ya No Te Veria Mas (Never See You)"
2. Willie Nelson - "Always Seem to Get Things Wrong"
3. Feist - "Somewhere Down the Road"
4. Bright Eyes - "Big Old House"
5. Emmylou Harris - "The Speed of Sound"
6. Jesse Harris - "It Will Stay With Us"
7. The Black Keys - "If You Ever Slip"
8. M. Ward - "Crooked Lines"
9. Norah Jones - "World of Trouble"
10. Brad Mehldau - "Never See You"
11. Cat Power - "It's Alright to Fail"
12. Jesse Harris - "One Day the Dam Will Break"
13. Tony Scherr - "You, the Queen"
14. "Morning in a Strange City (Cafe)"
15. Rocha - "No More"
16. Jesse Harris - "Dear Dorothy"
17. Rocha - "Never See You"
18. "There Are No Second Chances"

Related links: Jesse Harris' official website
The Hottest State: A Novel by Ethan Hawke
Norah Jones: Ready for her close up (Issue 29 cover story)

Got a news tip for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.