From The Oregonian
Country angel Emmylou Harris spreads her songwriting wings
Friday, June 29, 2001
By John Foyston of The Oregonian staff
Emmylou Harris' "Red Dirt Girl" nearly came to be known as "Michelangelo" or "The Pearl" because the album's title song wasn't written until after the main recording session.
"I thought we were through with the record, and I was driving back to Nashville, when I saw a road sign to Meridian, Miss., and I just started rhyming," Harris said recently in a telephone interview. "I had Lillian soon enough, but I didn't know what kind of character she'd be, so I started working with images of my own childhood. Then I went to see 'Boys Don't Cry' and I think the seriousness of that film and the way those characters were so lost really influenced the song -- it practically wrote itself after that."
"Red Dirt Girl" the song is an example of what "Red Dirt Girl" the album proves: That Emmylou Harris has matured into a wonderful songwriter as well as being one of the most distinctive and emotionally honest singers around. As in her heartbreaking tale of two country girls, one who got away and one who was trapped.
Nobody knows when she started her skid She was only 27 and she had five kids Could've been the whiskey, could've been the pills Could've been the dreams she was trying to kill But there won't be a mention in the News of the World About the life and the death of a red dirt girl named Lillian Who never got any further across the line than Meridian."
Although "Red Dirt Girl" was just shy of album No. 30 for Harris, she had to battle a sophomore jinx of sorts because it was her first studio album in the five years since the genre-expanding (and Grammy-winning) "Wrecking Ball."
"I knew that I wanted to write material for the new studio album," Harris said. "And I didn't want a standard band sound, I wanted the textures of 'Wrecking Ball' because that's where I was most pumped artistically. But I also knew that I didn't want to make 'Son of Wrecking Ball' with the same kind of material and the same people, so in 1997 it was time to get serious. I let the band and my management go and asked to be released from my label, and I put on my songwriter hat and got to work."
Although Harris likes to write alone -- to "stew in my own juices," as she puts it, she's got some stellar co-writers on songs such as "Bang the Drum Slowly," an elegy for her father, which she wrote with the incomparable Guy Clark. Or "Tragedy," which was co-written with Rodney Crowell -- who spent some years in Emmylou's Hot Band back when. (That song also features background vocals from Patti Scialfa and Bruce Springsteen.)
Of course, these fine new songs benefit from the two things that Harris always has brought to the party: a wonderful band -- Spyboy in this instance -- and That Voice. Harris' voice is a marvel: Perhaps more than any other singer, she erases the distinction between vox celeste and vox humana, and those moments when that purity cracks to reveal the earth and humanity at its core are what make her one of the great singers. Her timbre may be less ethereal than 30 years ago, but time seems to have gentled the traces of frost and steel once found in her upper range; these days, Harris' overwhelming humanity shimmers in every syllable she utters.
You can reach John Foyston at 503-221-8368 or by e-mail at johnfoyston@news.oregonian.com.