Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell: Old Yellow Moon

On “Hanging Up My Heart” and Roger Miller’s vintage “Invitation To The Blues,” Old Yellow Moon’s opening tracks, Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris seem to embrace a randy hard-country throwdown, tinged with Texas shuffles and twin fiddles. But that’s hardly the point.

Their duet project—the first for the man who became the Emmylou Harris to Harris’ Gram Parsons on her solo debut, Pieces of the Sky—is certainly classic country, but its greater truth emerges as Harris’ brooding take on Patti Scialfa’s “Spanish Dancer” presages a contemplative journey through lives lived to the hilt, addictions and their costs and recognition of one’s ultimate place on the horizon.

From there, an acoustic piano rises and falls as Crowell considers the narrowing portals and missteps along the path in the slow-moving “Open Season On My Heart.” Harris offers harmonic bolstering on the chorus of Crowell’s clear-eyed assessment, taking a chunk of a later verse as a plaintive steel pours tears across the sparse arrangement.

The running-on-the-rims acoustic guitar punch on Kris Kristofferson’s “Chase the Feeling” serves to reinforce the rejoinder to a lapsed junkie who may not make it. The next track’s slighter addiction—Hank DeVito and Donivan Cowart’s smoky Texas blues “Black Caffeine”—adds staccato bravado and lightens the tone.

The highpoint is perhaps Allen Reynolds’ jewel “Dreaming My Dreams With You,” a bittersweet waltz that harvests lives lived in songs, hopes and the love of one who could never quite be. When the pair’s voices merge in an ethereal “ooooh” over the bridge, the potency of their shared history enters a sublime realm beyond words.