Emmylou Harris – Red Dirt Girl
Emmylou Harris has now been opening ears, breaking hearts, challenging minds and stimulating fantasies in country and pop music for nearly 30 years, on more than 30 records. She has been atop the outside for so long that she functions virtually as the mother of alt.country — the one who reintroduced the Louvin Brothers to the world, who countrified the Beatle ballads, who showed that girls can build supergroups too, who offers guidance to upstarts such as Ryan Adams, and who keeps the music and legend of Gram Parsons always alive.
As a band-backed solo artist, she has kept right on cracking the hard boundaries between musical genres and markets, between the traditional and the radical. As Pieces Of The Sky scored with transformed, emotion-laden versions of songs by Dolly Parton, Lennon/McCartney, Billy Sherrill and the Louvins in 1975, so would the entirely different Wrecking Ball shake things up with fresh interpretations of Neil Young and Steve Earle, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, Julie Miller and Gillian Welch, in 1995.
The restlessness and need for a fresh recharge which led to that landmark Lanois-produced pop departure five years ago has now taken Harris in an ambitious new direction — to her first largely self-penned album since the twang epic Ballad Of Sally Rose, 15 years ago. (That song cycle was, in fact, co-written with ex-husband Paul Kennerley.)
We shouldn’t forget that Emmylou has offered co-written efforts from the very beginning of her career. While her versions of “If I Could Only Win Your Love” and “Too Far Gone” were her chart-climbers, it was “Boulder To Birmingham”, co-written with Bill Danoff, and specifically evoking (not for the last time) her ties to then recently-departed Gram Parsons, that proved her a force to be reckoned with. “Boulder To Birmingham” found images that still burn in memory, with a sound that could rise to the level of anthem and fall to a whispered tear. It was a hell of a song for her to sing.
It has been, overwhelmingly, the act of interpreting other writers’ offerings that has revealed Harris’ special grasp of a song’s fabric and possibilities. That finding of something else in there, in the words, in the tune, in the rhythm — which is precisely what her fans have come to expect from her — is as much the basis of her art as a singer as are the choices an actor makes with performing a text.
If, after decades of ascendance of singer-songwriters (good and bad), many of us have come to take for granted that “no one sings the song like the writer,” it may still be quite a challenge for writers to find more in their own creations than what’s already been put down on paper. (And maybe we don’t give enough credit to those who can actually lift their own writing in performance.)
There’s also no assurance at all — as most of Red Dirt Girl demonstrates — that even the most talented of interpreters, those most familiar with what a singer needs to get hold of a song, will automatically furnish themselves the material to allow it.
This new Emmylou offering builds its sound from some solid sources. Malcolm Burn, engineer on Wrecking Ball, produces and plays bass. Buddy Miller and Daryl Johnson return from Spyboy, joined at times by Jill Cunniff of Luscious Jackson, and harmony singers such as Bruce Springsteen, Patti Scialfa, and Dave Matthews. The production is clearly aware of the Lanois approach, which can work well for voices that may be a bit road-wearied, and may sometimes actually deliver a cleaner tone, bringing the vocal forward. But the sameness of this sound, for which the relentless drum machines are partly to blame, leaves the singer frustratingly remote, and the songs hard to distinguish.
The overall result of this approach is largely midtempo, familiar pop. The opening track, “The Pearl”, for instance, often uncomfortably revisits the sound of Bette Midler anthems (“From A Distance”, “Wind Beneath My Wings”), without that unique interpreter’s particular abilities to make all the uplift live a little. Though the rhythms on this album change here and there (the lullaby-invoking “My Baby Needs A Shepherd”, the Springsteen/Scialfa-backed “Tragedy”), what’s left is still an aural soup that rarely makes the listener stop and really listen.
There are songs that tell stories that jump out at you, and lyrics with traction; the title cut, for example, is a memorable, twang-influenced ballad of lost hopes. But the majority flow into chains of wordmaking with little room for breath, let alone inflection. “One Big Love” is an exception, full of catchy hooks and singable phrases — and it’s the one non-original cut on the album (written by Patty Griffin).
There are too many received phrases: “Helped her cross the…waters of the Rubicon” … “Were you there at Armageddon?” … “A price beyond rubies” … “A field of thorns and roses” — and these from several songs. One, “Bang The Drum Slowly”, which salutes a World War II veteran, perhaps a father, is nevertheless a catalog of phrases that gain little from their overfamiliarity.
More troubling, there are simply too many moments that tell about memories, dreams, emotions, but the sound and lyric leaves the singer no room to evoke them. (A problem even with “Tragedy”, a relatively strong number here: It comments on tragedy, but doesn’t strike at the heart.)
The music Emmylou Harris truly owns — her interpretations of the works of the songwriting masters of our era — has brought me, and so many others, a lifetime of joy. So, alas, it is no joy at all to have to state the obvious: Red Dirt Girl is simply kind of dull.