August 13, 2004
'It's really important to choose to work with a producer you trust, and not fight them,' Emmylou Harris says. 'It's a formula that's really worked for me.'
By DAVID MENCONI, Staff Writer
In certain circles, getting Emmylou Harris to sing on your record is not unlike the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Quavering with emotion, the angelic tones of Harris' voice make it one of the most instantly identifiable instruments in popular music. In recent years, Harris has leant her inimitable vibrato to records by Ryan Adams, the Dixie Chicks, Chieftains, Patty Griffin and countless others.
"Let's face it, when Emmylou starts singing anything, everybody just stands up and salutes," says Bernie Leadon, whose new album features Harris on two songs. "She has so much emotional weight and integrity in her voice, and is such a gracious, giving person. She sings one word, and you just believe it."
Harris, who plays Saturday at Cary's Koka Booth Amphitheatre at Regency Park on the "Sweet Harmony Traveling Revue," sounds like such a natural singer that you might be surprised at just how much it takes out of her. Indeed, she gets so many requests to sing on other records that she's had to start being more selective about it.
"At a certain point, I had to start saying no, I can't keep doing this for everybody," Harris says, speaking by phone from her manager's office in Nashville. "As much as I'm honored to be asked, it's just too much work for me if I'm not that familiar with the person's work. So I finally decided I just have to know the person before I'll do it. It would be easier if I were a quick study and could breeze through it in a half-hour -- like Dolly, she's so fast. But after all these years ... well, I still don't understand headphones. And it's still traumatic for me. If I'm amongst friends, I don't feel so panicky and can enjoy the process. So usually I just say it has to be a close friend, or a relative."
But the thing is, Harris hasn't really narrowed the field down by much because she has a lot of close friends -- she's on a first-name basis with Dolly Parton, after all. One of the most universally beloved figures in Nashville, Harris is one of those consensus artists that almost everyone seems to like. She first gained notice as the late Gram Parsons' duet foil in the early 1970s, appearing with him on two landmark albums that defined the emerging country-rock genre. Since then, she's been influential among both country and rock singers, including her current touring partners Patty Griffin and Gillian Welch.
Before finding her voice as a singer, however, Harris spent some time around these parts. She put in three semesters at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, as a drama major.
"Yes, I wanted to be an actress," she says, dramatically enunciating that last word with a snicker. "I suppose I had a certain amount of talent. But once I really got into music and realized the difference between what I knew instinctively as a singer and what I knew instinctively as an actress, you could not even compare the two. I just didn't have that chip in me for acting, and I don't feel like having acted helped me as a singer. Acting felt like an alien environment, whereas music felt like I'd found home. I suppose people who are really good at acting feel what I feel when I sing."
After Parsons' death in 1973, Harris spent the next two decades playing earthy music with rock elements, but firmly rooted in country. She fell midway between Parton's pure country and Linda Ronstadt's countrified rock, and all three women teamed up for 1987's hugely successful "Trio" project. Harris also sang on the mega-popular soundtrack of 2000's "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," as a siren's voice on "Don't Leave Nobody But the Baby" (with Welch and Alison Krauss).
Nine years ago, Harris changed artistic courses rather drastically on "Wrecking Ball," an album produced by Daniel Lanois, whose credits include Peter Gabriel and U2. On covers of songs by Neil Young, Lucinda Williams, Bob Dylan and even Jimi Hendrix, Lanois set Harris' voice within atmospheric arena-rock arrangements far removed from traditional country music, creating a strange and mesmerizing cosmic hybrid.
"You're always trying to jump-start yourself and get excited," Harris says. "If you're lucky enough to find something great at the beginning of your career, you stick to that. You have to change some, but it has to come from a combination of organic and natural change, and sometimes making a big decision to take some chances. People thought I was taking a big chance with Daniel, but I knew it would at least be interesting and I jumped at the chance to work with him. Whatever he did, it really moved me. I didn't exactly know what it was, but I wanted some of that; to see what he could do to what I did. I wasn't prepared for how beautiful and exquisite his work would be on that record.
"To me, producers are artists with particular styles and abilities," she adds. "It's really important to choose to work with a producer you trust, and not fight them. It's a formula that's really worked for me."
Harris continues in a similar direction on her current album, "Stumble Into Grave" (Nonesuch Records), sympathetically produced by Lanois understudy Malcolm Burn. Exotic rhythmic accents creep into songs such as "Here I Am" and "Time in Babylon." And "O Evangeline" reimagines Longfellow's tale of the martyred young lover Evangeline, who dies of a broken heart, as someone who goes on to lead a long and full life -- a character not unlike the 57-year-old Harris herself.
"That character is an archetype in our psyche and our culture," Harris says. "The name Evangeline conjures up certain images that we all sort of respond to, and that song does not talk about Evangeline as a young woman who died tragically for love -- which is not what happened, historically. In actuality, Evangeline lived to be an old woman who did many good works. So that's a song about growing old and dealing with your self-image, and other people's image of you that may be stuck in time."