Emmylou Can't Stay Away
Ray Purvis
* 01/15/99
The West Australian
Copyright West Australian Newspapers Limited, all rights reserved.
Between guesting on other people's albums and touring, the First Lady
* of contemporary country music, Emmylou Harris, finally found the time
to make her own record. She tells RAY PURVIS how she's always done her
own thing.
LOVE or hate the music industry, sometimes you just can't get away
from it. Emmylou Harris's recent well-earned sabbatical turned out to
be
not only a busman's holiday-from-hell but one of the most intensively
creative periods in her glittering career.
"It ended up to be 12 months of full-on work," she says by telephone
from her home in Nashville. "We'd just spent nearly two years on the
road touring (her last album) Wrecking Ball and I figured it was time
to
slow down, take some time off and get some material together for the
next record. But it just didn't work out that way."
Within the space of the year - besides taking part in last year's US
celebration of female artists called Lilith Fair - the prolific,
angelic-voiced singer confirmed her commitment to the new (and
not-so-new), breed of roots-based musicians by guesting on more than a
half-a-dozen albums, as well as finishing some projects she was
developing. This new body of work is now starting to filter through to
the record shops.
The list of CDs is startlingly impressive. There's the brilliant new
McGarrigle Sisters album (The McGarrigle Hour) on which Emmylou is
described in the liner notes as an "honourable McGarrigle". She sings
backing vocals on Willie Nelson's atmospheric new Teatro and performs a
guest vocal on her Nashville neighbour - 'we only live two doors away
from each other" - Lucinda William's triumphant album Car Wheels On A
Gravel Road.
Add to that backing vocals for Nanci Griffiths (Other Voices, Too),
Vic Chesnutt (The Salesman And Bernadette), Kate Campbell (Visions Of
Plenty), Patti Griffin (Flaming Red) and duets with longtime friend and
contemporary Linda Ronstadt (Tammy Wynette tribute album) and actor
Robert Duvall (The Apostle soundtrack).
Also awaiting release are a Gram Parson's tribute album (with
contributions from Beck and Sheryl Crow), a duet CD with Linda Ronstadt
as well as Volume 2 of the successful Trio album (released in 1987)
with
Ms Ronstadt and Dolly Parton that features a surprise appearance of now
Zen Buddhist monk Leonard Cohen.
Somewhere among this mind boggling array of projects, the workaholic,
singer-songwriter found time to compile a new album - her first live CD
* since the traditional, bluegrass-sounding Live At The Ryman (1992)
recorded with her then band the Nash Ramblers.
Called Spyboy, the new album features the same exceptional
musicians -
* Buddy Miller on guitars (seen in Perth early last year with Steve
* Earle), Daryl Johnson on bass and Brady Blade on drums. Blade
accompanied Emmylou on her 1997 Australian tour.
"Well this album was the top priority for me," says the fine looking,
naturally grey-haired 51-year-old singer about the sparse, exciting
Spyboy CD. "It is both a souvenir of the Wrecking Ball tour as well as
a
chance to sing some of the songs from my past. I also very much wanted
to record our version of Daniel's (Lanois) song The Maker that we'd
been
performing on the tour. These guys in the band (except for Miller)
played on Wrecking Ball and that was a ground-breaking step for me, so
I
wanted to capture the live splendour of the shows."
Harris says her desire to record with Lanois - best known in the pop
world for his work with U2 (co-producing The Joshua Tree) and Peter
Gabriel - dates back to hearing his production on Bob Dylan's Oh Mercy,
The Neville Brother's Yellow Moon and Lanois' own 1989 debut Arcadie.
"I put myself in his hands. I wanted him to take my voice and my
vision and make me part of his landscapes, another colour in his
palette, so to speak. I knew that no matter how far out he gets it's
the
melody and the song that's at the centre of it all."
Her much acclaimed singing on Wrecking Ball (1996) - her first album
away from Warner Bros and Asylum - won a Grammy for Best Contemporary
Folk Album. It also revitalised a career that is full of crossover
appeal and has spanned nearly 30 years and over 25 albums.
* In some regards this watershed alternative country/pop album is
reminiscent of her early 70s dark, transcendental music with her mentor
Gram Parsons, the man about whom she later wrote the song Boulder To
Birmingham.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Emmylou Harris grew up in Washington,
where she was a beauty pageant queen and later formed a folk duo while
studying at the University of North Carolina. She began her musical
career as a folk singer in Greenwich Village in 1967 where she recorded
her first, long-deleted album Gliding Bird (1969) on the independent
Jubilee label.
It was a chance encounter with Flying Burrito Brothers members Chris
Hillman and Rick Roberts that led to her introduction to the (by then)
wasted Gram Parsons. Parsons (who died at the age of 26) had come from
a
rich Southern family and was a former member of both The Byrds and the
Burrito Bros. He had hit a trough in his career after a sojourn in
England with the Rolling Stones and a failed solo session for A&M and
was looking for a female duet partner to help relaunch his career.
Together they recorded two albums GP (1973) and the posthumously
released Grievous Angel (1974). Emmylou was also part of Parson's
short-lived Fallen Angels band.
Their two-year recording relationship provided a needed direction for
Harris's music. Today she credits Parsons with nurturing and developing
her style. She described the experience on the liner notes to Sleepless
Nights: "You don't wind up in Gram's corner without going through some
radical changes if your own life has been relatively uneventful."
* Parsons gave country music a new dialogue all about long hair, drugs,
the city and cruising on motorbikes. After his death Emmylou kept
Gram's
memory alive by recording two albums Pieces Of The Sky (1975) and Elite
Hotel (1976) with the same backing musicians (mainly Elvis Presley's
TCB
Vegas touring band - James Burton, Glen D. Hardin and Ronnie Tutt) that
Parsons had employed on his solo albums.
Throughout her career Harris - who consistently refuses to look like
an exaggerated country Barbie doll - has succeeded in combining her
love
* of traditional roots and country music with her own modern
sensibilities.
She displays a fragile, innocent, classic quality and remains
famously
fastidious about surrounding herself with only the best musicians that
both talent and money can buy.
* Her fearless support of such wayward talents as Steve Earle, Townes
Van Zandt, Rodney Crowell and Guy Clark - while at the same time
strengthening her rock roots performing and recording with The Band and
Neil Young - has often put her on a direct collision course with
formula-based, demographic-obsessed, mainstream Nashville. "Fortunately
* I don't have to rely on radio air play on country music stations," she
says.
