The idea for All The Roadrunning—Mark Knopfler’s long-in-coming duets album with legendary interpretive/harmony singer Emmylou Harris—took root in 1999 when Knopfler came to Nashville to continue work on his album Sailing to Philadelphia. At that point he had duets with Van Morrison and James Taylor in the can, along with the basic tracks for a pair of originals earmarked for duets with Harris—the ebullient “Red Staggerwing” (which Harris calls “a Johnny & June song”) and the hardscrabble narrative “Donkey Town.”
But after they joined their voices on the two songs, Knopfler was stunned by what he heard. “I knew it was something other,” he recalls. So he held them off the album, and on his next trip to Nashville a year later, he brought two more projected duets with him, “This Is Us” and “All The Roadrunning.” Getting together a third time in 2002, they did the remaining eight songs in a week, live off the floor.
“There wasn’t much premeditation to any of this, really,” Knopfler says. “But I do remember thinking, before we really got underway with it, that it had been awhile since there had been a record like this—this rather more grown-up man/woman duet sort of thing. I think it will seem reasonably fresh to people as a notion, especially nowadays, because there seems to be such an accent on youth.” Two of the record’s songs, the exquisite lullaby “Love and Happiness” and the playful “Belle Starr,” were written by Harris.
“Mark really fell in love with ‘Love and Happiness.’” Harris remembers. “And ‘Belle Starr’ became another kind of a ‘courting song,’ he calls it, where there’s a real conversation between a man and a woman. So they fit the project.”
To Knopfler’s initial frustration, the completed album had to wait while their respective labels released Harris’ Red Dirt Girl and Knopfler’s Shangri-La, and then Rhino put out career compilations for each of them. “I was thinking, ‘This music’s not gonna sit on the shelf too well,’” Knopfler admits. “But the male/female face of the thing still seemed to be as happy when it emerged as it originally was.”
FIRST GRAM, NOW MARK
Harris reckons it’s been quite a while since the last time she did a duets album with a male singer. “As far as whole albums, I think Gram [Parsons], really,” she offers. “Obviously in the country world there’s a real history, a rich tradition of male/female duets. But I couldn’t think of a whole pop record sung by people who have separate careers. So the most country thing about the record is the fact that it draws upon that tradition, but I don’t know how you would really categorize the songs themselves—[Mark’s] such a good writer. There’s a wonderful myriad of characters, situations and dynamics covered in this record.”
All the Roadrunning proves revelatory not just for the naturalness with which Harris and Knopfler blend their voices and sensibilities but also for the fact that Knopfler holds his own as a vocalist alongside one of the best song stylists of the rock era. “I think his prowess as a guitar player has overshadowed his singing,” Harris offers. “He has a conversational style, which really serves the storytelling aspect of his writing. And it’s a very mature voice—that was true even when he was young, but especially now. Age has served him well.”
Characteristically, Knopfler deflects the compliment. “Emmy would make anybody sound good,” he says. “When she sings the first line of a song—I’m in. I suppose, as a parallel, if you were directing a movie, Emmy is the actress that would make the script live, but very much in her own way. I always see the characters in the songs when Emmy sings them. When I hear that woman, I get a picture. She’s come to represent ‘Woman’ in a multifaceted way, in a civilized and civilizing way. There’s a fantastic amount of patience and a tremendous capacity for love in her, which never ceased to amaze me.”
BRING THE FAMILY
Conceptually speaking, the striking thing about All the Roadrunning is that it’s so clearly about the long-term monogamous relationships of adults, which naturally leads to examination of family life. “Emmy and I are both parents,” Knopfler points out, “and the most important thing to us is our families. So a song about being a parent, like ‘Love and Happiness,’ becomes loaded somehow when you’re doing it with Emmylou. And also, I think, because of the other songs, when I found myself doing that one, it was quite emotional, in a way that I wouldn’t have understood 20 years ago.”
Knopfler is proud of the completed work. “I wanted to make a real meat-and-potatoes record of the kind that Emmy could be proud … just in terms of the tradition,” he says. “I like the fact that it stands up on four legs and looks you right in the eye.
Harris shares her partner’s enthusiasm. “When this album was finished,” she recalls, “I said to myself, ‘This is like my present from the gods, or whatever, for 30 years of faithful service in music.’ It was such a joy to make this record. Mark’s been so generous and gracious by really making it a duet record and including my songs. And then cutting it in Nashville, it was great. I didn’t have to leave town, and we did it like grown-ups. Who says you have to suffer to sing the blues?”