FEATURE ARTICLE
Emmylou Harris smashes preconceptions with `Wrecking Ball' album
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., May 2, 1997) -- When news that Emmylou Harris was recording an album with producer Daniel Lanois leaked out in the summer of 1995, many an eyebrow was raised. At the time, Lanois was best known for his slick, high-tech work on best-selling albums by rock artists lke U2 and Peter Gabriel, and Harris was still thought of, rightly or wrongly, as a country singer with a purist, acoustic approach to her music. The pairing of Lanois and Harris seemed, on the surface at least, at best unusual and at worst a travesty.
When "Wrecking Ball" (Elektra) was released in the fall of 1995, some of peoples' worst fears were confirmed. Harris and Lanois had indeed made an album that sounded nothing like any previous Emmylou Harris recording. It included U2's drummer, Larry Mullen, Jr. It had touches of the post-industrial soundscapes familiar to listeners of U2's albums and other Lanois productions. It included a cover of a Jimi Hendrix song, two original compositions by Lanois, and more atmospherics than you could shake a stick at.
The only thing was, it was also a brilliant success. Somehow, the high relief and stark contrast between Lanois' state-of-the-art production and Harris's timeless vocals -- seemingly channeled from a 1920s Appalachian front-porch -- made for a shimmering, suggestive fusion that had critics, including this one, and fans alike swooning.
To anyone who had been following Harris's career closely since she first gained fame in the early-'70s as country-rocker Gram Parsons' duet partner, this risky change of pace should not have come as such a surprise. For if there has been one constant in Harris's career, it has been an unwillingness to submit to anyone's preconception of what Emmylou Harris should sound like, and a penchant for crossing genres and borders.
Local audiences will get a chance to hear the 1997 version of Emmylou Harris -- one that is still focused on the songs and sound of "Wrecking Ball" -- tomorrow night when the singer and her band, Spyboy, perform at the Berkshire Performing Arts Theatre in Lenox, as part of the National Music Foundation's weekend-long Berkshire Music Festival. The show starts at 8 with warm-up act Julie and Buddy Miller. Tickets are $20. Call 637-1800 for reservations or more information.
A year-and-a-half after the recording sessions that resulted in "Wrecking Ball," Harris remains enthused about the experiment that resulted in such a radical departure from the country, bluegrass and roots-oriented albums that came before.
"I think it was time to infuse the music with something a little different," said Harris in a recent phone interview from her Nashville home. "It was time to flex some different muscles once again, and boy, I'm sore in places I didn't know I had.
"I look on it as an extraordinary gift, because it's got my creative juices going again, and I've got a great band that I love playing with, and the old songs set against the `Wrecking Ball' material and played with this band take on a whole new shimmer for me. So yeah, it holds up for me as an artist, personally."
Harris, who has six Grammy Awards to her credit, said she wasn't sure how fans or critics would react to the highly-stylized production of the album. "We didn't really know what the response was going to be, if it was going to completely alienate people who still bought my records, or if they were going to love it, or if it would bring in new people and also bring in old people who had lost interest in buying my records," she said. "And I think it did all those things. It did alienate some people. There were people in Scotland and Ireland especially who would just not walk across the street to hear `Wrecking Ball' and have said so publicly in print. And then there are older fans who embrace it and love it, and it seems like it's brought in a new audience, too.
"Ultimately, we just set out to make some music. 'Cause you can't really go in with any idea -- I mean, we had no idea what we were going to do, absolutely none....Even though there's a certain signature sound to what Daniel does, he's able to use that in ways for different records so that he's able to adapt to different artists and continue to come out with different ways to use his own musical vision.
"I just thought of it as a grand experiment. And I always kind of need it that way. All records, you get a bunch of people together or a producer and you go into the chemistry lab and you see what you come up with. You might come out with penicillin and other times you might blow up the studio. You never know what's going to happen."
That some may have been shocked or dismayed by her new sound doesn't vex her. Harris is used to being misunderstood. "It's a misconception, but also a truth, when they pigeonhole me as country music," said Harris. "I obviously came through the country music door. That was where I found the soul in my voice, through working with Gram Parsons, through discovering the harmonies of the Louvin Brothers, and the incredible restrained singing of George Jones. Certainly that was where I first started and made my home base.
"But I have moved in and out of that, experimenting and doing different things, altering my career. But with this incredible popularity of this sort of generic form of country music that's happening right now, when people think of me as a country artist, they have no clue as to what I do and they've never heard my records. And so I think to just call me a country artist -- which is something I very much wanted back in the '70s, because I was embracing the kind of music that I wanted to turn people on to -- but now, I think you're lumped in with a lot of `hat acts' and bare navels. That's pretty much what's happened to country radio right now."
In the meantime, Harris is happy to continue barnstorming the country with Spyboy, playing songs from "Wrecking Ball" and older favorites reworked in her new style. The band includes Daryl Johnson, formerly of the Neville Brothers, on bass guitar, and drummer Brady Blade, whose brother, Brian Blade, along with Johnson, played on "Wrecking Ball." The band also includes guitarist Buddy Miller.
"I still feel `Wrecking Ball' has a lot of life to it, and needs to be heard by other people," said Harris. "We still feel you need to get back in the trenches and still go out and play for people live. It's the old fashioned way, but it still works."
As for what comes next -- how Harris can possibly follow up "Wrecking Ball" with something equally as compelling -- the singer laughs and replies, "Well, that's the question. I stay on the road for the rest of my life."
[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on May 2, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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