The Way Emmylou Harris Rolls

As Scarlet Rivera’s violin tumbles into the ditch of “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below),” Emmylou Harris’ voice quarrels with Bob Dylan’s. You can hear the friction between them even without the music, and it finds me just as “Return of the Grievous Angel” finds me: with two singers pointed at each other always, one circling the other even in absence. I close my eyes and am on my grandparents’ patio one more time, hearing the sounds of Harris’ silvery soprano on Roses In the Snow fall out of a CD player and clutter up the room all the way to the damned ceiling. I shuffle my streaming library and find her in the songs of her daughters, Margo Price, the Chicks, Sheryl Crow, and Gillian Welch. She’s there every Thanksgiving, during my yearly Last Waltz listen, singing “Evangeline” with the Band. For as long as I’ve known it, Emmylou Harris has sung the poetry of my life.

And that life exists in a binary: before Wrecking Ball and after Wrecking Ball, an album born three years before me yet so woven into my DNA. It was an eclectic piece of work in 1995, a rejuvenation not unlike Johnny Cash’s American Recordings from a year earlier. The critics dug it and the industry praised it, awarding a forty-nine-year-old Harris with her seventh Grammy, for Best Contempoary Folk Recording, in ‘96. Some say Wrecking Ball turned Harris into an “elder stateswoman of country music.” Others considered the record to be boundary-pushing in a way not unlike how her soulmate Gram Parsons’ work in the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers obliterated the genre and patched it back together with a deep-fried, cosmic paste.

Most Popular

But, Harris tells me, when she made Wrecking Ball she was at a “stop-gap,” having made country records for twenty years, with a foray into bluegrass tucked in there too. She’d struck out mightily since releasing Trio with Dolly and Linda in ‘87—though her cover of Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest” on Brand New Dance is fabulously heart-mending—and needed a restart. “I think a lot of people probably thought, ‘Well, I’ve had my run,’” she admits. “But that’s the only thing I knew how to do, singing and going out on the road. It’s been my life.” Her record company, Elektra, had tried well enough on her previous record, 1993’s Cowgirl’s Prayer, but hit a wall once it peaked at #34 on the Billboard 200.

That’s hardly grounds for a “flop,” but outlaw country music had already blown past the precipice of the pop pantheon. “They came to me and said, ‘Tell us what you want to do next. Who do you want to work with?’” Harris remembers. She was listening to two albums constantly then: Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy and its producer, Daniel Lanois’ debut, Acadie. Harris “didn’t know Lanois from Adam” but knew of his work with U2 and Peter Gabriel. She knew he was a Canadian guy with a background working on multi-faceted rock successes, and she liked how he utilized folk music and electronica together. So her people called his manager, Melanie Ciccone, and set up a meeting in Nashville. They got dinner together and Harris played him a couple of songs she’d been thinking of recording. That night, he told her, “Let’s make a record.”

The sound of Oh Mercy affected Harris deeply. She broadly refers to that sound as “the atmosphere” but points out the “turbluent rhythms” made with very few instruments as touchpoints, specifically. “I wasn’t writing anything then,” she admits. “I was still just a singer looking for songs to sing. This was an opportunity to work with someone different.” She and Lanois went to Woodland Studios, a historic studio in Nashville now owned by Welch and David Rawlings, and put a bunch of musicians—Malcolm Burn, Larry Mullen Jr., Tony Hall, Daryl Johnson—in one room together. “There was no separation of people,” Harris says. “I found myself inspired as a singer.” She brought “All My Tears” and “Orphan Girl,” Lanois suggested she record Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand” but in 6/8, and Burn suggested the title track, from Neil Young’s Freedom. “It was a real collaboration, which all records are, but, in this case, I was so inspired by what I heard, and that’s what you need. You start with that song. You love the song. And then you’re inspired by that, by what you’re hearing. I don’t think we had any idea of what kind of record we were going to make.”

Harris and Lanois weren’t concerned with country radio trends anymore, immersing themselves in the recording process totally instead of trying to play catch-up with the Shania Twains, Faith Hills, and Joe Dee Messinas making splashes on the charts. The songs they made together were spacious and glowing like Dylan’s “Most of the Time,” positioning Harris’ soprano in the foreground while dapples of guitar and humid drums unwound around her. Though by then she’s made most of her records with Brian Ahern, no one has ever captured Harris like Lanois does on Wrecking Ball—a frill-less cosmos with Harris as its anchoring echo, in Julie Miller’s “All My Tears,” Steve Earle’s “Goodbye,” and her own “Deeper Well.”

In Harris’ care, Appalachian ballads and contemporary lullabies share a vocabulary. And under Lanois’ supervision, those songs hum, wilt, and grin until they explode in “May This Be Love,” a cresting, euphoric take on one of Jimi Hendrix’s earliest songs with the Experience. My favorite Emmylou Harris tune is “Miss the Mississippi and You,” which is actually an old Jimmie Rodgers tune, because she represents our most primal form of musicality, when we’re taught to sing the words of others first—words that often predate our own. By the time she started making Wrecking Ball, she says, cover songs meant “everything” to her even then. “I still consider myself an interpreter.”

She and Lanois followed their excitements down to Kingsway Studio in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where Young and his spouse Pegi Morton showed up to sing “Wrecking Ball” and add a “harmony and harmonica” to Harris’ interpretation of Lucinda Williams’ “Sweet Old World.” Until Sufjan Stevens sang “There’s a World” two years ago, it was Harris’ transcendent and transient re-contextualization of “Wrecking Ball” thirty years ago that was the best restoration of one of Young’s deep cuts. “He set up the speakers the way he liked it and got the sound he liked,” Harris recalls, “and then he did one take on [‘Wrecking Ball’].” She met Young in 1973, on stage at Liberty Hall in Houstin, when she was touring in Gram Parsons’ Fallen Angels band. “We were doing two shows a night. And Neil, with Linda Ronstadt opening, were playing the big, huge venue across town, [Sam Houston Coliseum]. But, because we were doing two shows, Neil and his band, and Linda and her band, all showed up and everybody sat in with us.”

But Harris says she didn’t get to know Young that night, that it was a year later, when she was working on Pieces of the Sky with Ahern in an Enactron truck in Los Angeles. Young wanted her voice on a new song he’d been working on, “Star of Bethlehem,” and showed up to the truck with his steel player, Ben Keith. “We sat in the comfort zone for hours and I overdubbed that part,” she beams. “If you want to talk about an artist that never paid attention at all to what was going on at the moment and was always waiting for the muse to say, ‘Okay, this is what you need to do next,’ Neil is the gold standard for an artist who wants to have any longevity.”

Harris needed that attitude for Wrecking Ball, an album that, in her own words, lost her a fan or two. “There were people who only wanted me to sing ‘Blue Kentucky Girl’ every night,” she laughs. “I’m so glad that I did give those folks something, but there were other things that they were not getting. My fans, over the years, have followed me wherever I decided to go, and most of them followed me.” Still, at a show in Glasgow, someone in the crowd yelled “Bloody heavy metal!” at her. Wrecking Ball shocked and embittered some of Harris’ longtime faithful, but “that’s the price you pay,” she concedes. “The most important thing for an artist is to feel creative and to feel excited about what you are doing. It doesn’t happen all the time. There are times when an artist, in a long career, is going to be treading water, because you can’t be coming up with something completely different. Maybe some artists can but, with every record, with every year, you’re doing the best work you can at every step of the way.”

“And then there are those moments when it’s like a rocket booster and you shoot off into the stratosphere,” she continues. “I feel that’s what Wrecking Ball did.”

YOU DO A RECORD and then you hit the road. “I said, ‘Okay, I love what’s happening. I love the way I feel like I’m singing. I love these songs and the sounds,’” Harris remembers. “But I did figure out that I was going to have to take some kind of left turn live.” After giving Wrecking Ball away, she and Lanois put together a band called Spyboy, with Daryl Johnson on bass and Brady Blade behind the drum kit. For the first part of their tour in ‘97, Lanois played electric guitar to show Harris “how to do it” before passing the baton off to the great Buddy Miller, whom she’d met when she still played shows with the Nash Ramblers. He was in a band with Jim Lauderdale and they opened for the Ramblers, and Miller caught Harris’ eye then. “There was so much depth to Buddy—his guitar playing, his singing, his everything. I remember that it crossed my mind, even before the [Wrecking Ball] tour. I was thinking, ‘I bet you Buddy Miller might be involved in this, somehow, when we take that next step.’”

Listen to Spyboy’s take on Tom Petty’s “Thing About You” and Miller’s goodness will make sense. I hear a collaborator as in step with Harris as Parsons was twenty-five years earlier, and she concurs, elaborating: “He knows how to be in a band. He knows how to back the singer, so we just seemed to fit together like a glove. The harmonies have always been really important to me, going back to Gram. That’s how I found my voice, and I’m most comfortable having those harmonies or those duets.” She had it with Rodney Crowell and Ricky Skaggs, Barry Tashian, Sam Bush, John Randall Stewart, and Daniel Lanois. And then she had it with Buddy Miller: an unbroken line of extraordinary chemistry.

And Spyboy were spectacular, Harris says, in their “reinventing of those songs, giving them a new life. If something is good, it will always stay good.” The Wrecking Ball songs—“Where Will I Be,” “Deeper Well,” “Every Grain of Sand,” “Sweet Old World,” “Sweet Old World,” and “All My Tears”—sounded great, but her classic stuff sounded even greater. “Born to Run,” “Boulder to Birmingham,” “Love Hurts,” “I Ain’t Living Long Like This,” “All I Left Behind,” which she wrote with the McGarrigle sisters, Anna and Kate—it was satisfying for her to play those songs every night, which were so much a part of her, and to have them live on, both in her singing them and in people hearing them. No song was played the same way twice on that tour, which spanned multiple continents and years, a product of the band’s energy. But the arrangements never changed. Maybe the solos got longer, when the juices were really flowing, Harris reckons, but the older songs took on new shapes and shined in “the hands of different musicians and the New Orleans rhythm section.”

“To be able to reproduce some of those sounds and some of that emotion and energy from an album that I’d just done was great enough,” Harris says. “But then, the older songs that I still sang, because they were good songs, they still spoke to me, as an artist and as a singer. To have them put into that stew and become part of the Wrecking Ball story, well, it was just magnificent for me.”

“How much did you need a group of players like that then, at that point in your career?” I ask Harris.

“Anytime you go into new territory, it’s going to be energizing, because it works,” she says. “I did need a boost. I did need that kind of energy.”

She’s lucked out for the last forty or so years, playing with backing bands who understood her language the whole way, like the Hot Band and the Nash Ramblers, who, she says, “were just as hot,” despite being an acoustic group. “But each band has a particular signature, and the music was always, as the British say, tip-top,” she laughs. “Every night. I always had the backing of terrific bands. I can add Spyboy to that category.”

Twenty-five Wrecking Ball shows were recorded, all thanks to Miller, who “wanted proof that I was actually part of this thing.” He brought racks of cables and tapes to each gig and employed the band’s sound crew to capture the music. They wound up with hundreds of songs, whittled it all down to just fourteen, and, with the help of Eminent Records, put them out on compact-disc in ‘98 under the title Spyboy. But it eventually went out of print, resurrected now by New West with the addition of five more unreleased recordings. Hearing “Wheels” again, one of her ever-historic, always-captivating performances, feels even brighter in the company of Miller, Blade, and Johnson’s additions. If Wrecking Ball was a tentpole release for the second-half of Harris’ career, then Spyboy, in its loose, psychedelic, and homey vastness, is Harris’ inexhaustible, career-spanning pageant.

There are two parts of Harris that I think about still. One is the support she’s given to so many musicians beyond herself, whether it’s Dylan, Neil, Mark Knopfler, Dolly and Linda, George Jones, or Gram. The other is what she accomplished on Wrecking Ball mostly by her lonesome, but not totally without the company of a few friends, like Earle, Neil, and Lucinda, thirty years ago. I do wonder what kind of affirmation or confidence making a record like that might have offered Harris then, but she plays it off. “Making records has always been about collaboration,” she says, and I can hear her smirk through the phone. “That includes the producer. I’ve had wonderful producers. I can’t imagine ever just producing myself. And then, of course, the musicians: If you’re able to record with musicians and take them on the road, that’s the ultimate, isn’t it?” But it’s not only that. It’s showing her message to folks all over. “I’ve always felt that I brought people along with me, and that I couldn’t get my message across without those people. That’s just the way I roll.”

When Emmylou Harris was a kid, her dad being in the Marines meant she grew up in too many towns in too few years. But she talked about how, after experiencing all of that, she knew how to take “home” with her on tour once she joined Gram Parsons and kept going from city to city after him. I ask her about it, about what “taking home” with her on tour meant in ‘97. “I’m very much at home on the road,” she says. “I’m at home on the bus. I’m at home in the hotel for a night and then moving on to another one—because it’s all part of bringing the music to the people. That’s the final step. You go into the studio and record the songs, and then you take them to the people.” So now, with thirty years of road beneath her, what have Wrecking Ball and Spyboy become? “It’s your ministry,” she tells me. “You have something to say and you want people to hear it.”

Listen to “Deeper Well” below.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

The Way Emmylou Harris Rolls

Harris spoke with Paste about Wrecking Ball and the live album it spawned three years later, Spyboy, which is getting a long overdue reissue from New West. Watch an exclusive premiere of “Deeper Well” below.