EMMYLOU HARRIS

WRECKING AN IMAGE

Mike Davies Sets The Ball Rolling With Emmylou Harris

(originally published October '95)

Anyone hoping that the recent New American Music (the latest marketing euphemism for country) tour might see a continuance of the reunion between Emmylou Harris and her legendary Hot Band can start sulking now. It was, she says firmly, strictly a one off and she wouldn't have done it if it wasn't for the fact of it being their 20th anniversary. But she hasn't gone back to the Nash Ramblers either. That line-up got disbanded some time back after she decided she wanted to make an album that was more "left field".

Instead, following her belief that you have to keep yourself guessing and changing musical surroundings to push forward, last January saw herself getting together with producer Daniel Lanois and working on a whole new sound. Not only that she made a dramatic relocation from snug and secure Nashville to the unfamiliar territory of Lanois' home base in New Orleans. Plus, although there's been extensive pre-production on the songs in Nashville with Lanois, when it came to putting them down she found herself recording live "in a big room with no separation" (and no lengthy rehearsals) with a two core session bands comprising a whole bunch of musicians with whom she had no past, namely Lanois, Malcolm Burn, Brian Blades, bassist Tony Hall from the Neville Brothers and, perhaps most unexpectedly, U2's Larry Mullen.

The result is Wrecking Ball, an album that clearly carries Emmylou's familiar voice but, as both producer and player, is also firmly stamped with the darker, broodingly atmospheric Lanois sound, announced from the get go by his own, appropriately titled song Where Will I Be. But sound aside, there's more surprises in store. Most notably May This Be Love. A Jimi Hendrix song on an Emmylou Harris album?

"That was Daniel's idea. He played me song to illustrate his point about country melody being found in rock and pop. I started singing it and it just seemed a good idea to try and get a cut. The song was so great it never occurred to me to say I didn't want to do something by Jimi Hendrix. In fact I'm kinda proud to be doing one."

Aside from Hendrix and Lanois, and the Harris/Crowell nugget Waltz Across Texas Tonight, there's plenty of other cracking contributions here. Among the more notable being Neil Young's title track, Steve Earle's Goodbye (from his comeback album on which Harris played), Lucinda Williams (Sweet Old World), Dylan (Every Grain Of Sand), and Harlan (a song she'd heard the McGarrigles do). Indeed Kate and Anna not only send her a tape but turned up to play on the track itself, as indeed did Young, Williams and Earle for their own songs.

Listening across the album, although not consciously intended, what emerges is a consistent theme, a cycle exploring the fragile nature of human existence and, perhaps in view of the recent changes in her musical direction, a lot of stuff about death, farewells, loss and moving on.

"I'm not sure that's so current as more a theme that's run through all of my music. These are universal subjects and emotions. But I do feel the album hangs together as an emotional journey. It's something you always set out to do and sometimes you're more successful than others. I think this one is."

If indeed album themes reveal themselves once the record's finished, it's interesting to note that Harris has said it's an album about yearning and trying to fill the emptiness inside. It's sounds like a resonant soundtrack for the millennium. So what's her emptiness?

She flusters slightly. "I don't think you can ever answer those questions. You just ask them. I think this was a successful asking. I don't know if it brings answers. I think everyone identifies an emptiness inside them, we're all searching for who knows what. I think you might be giving me more credit that I deserve. There's a lot of chance there, it's the process that's important. I think Where Will I Be sets the mood and raises subjects dealt with later, but I really do think every song here is strung together with a string of pearls."