Emmylou Harris - Wrecking Ball (Elektra, 1995)

By Scott

As an album title, Wrecking Ball is both misleading and appropriate. It’s true that this album represents a big shift in Emmylou Harris’s sound – a radical shift, maybe – but it’s not like she let swing a two-ton iron ball into the façade of her musical identity, demolishing her image as a beloved country icon in one fell swoop. She’s still Emmylou here, with that unmistakable voice, and the music fits comfortably into some broad Americana tradition, albeit in a modern way. So it’s not quite a demolition but maybe a renovation, or maybe taking a sturdy and familiar structure and building an addition that sticks out a bit but casts the entire structure in a new light. 

But enough with the bad architecture metaphors. This album is like a wrecking ball in the sense that it doesn’t fucking hesitate: when it needs to do its thing, it’ll plow through whatever’s in the way with total confidence. Not to say this is a balls-to-the-wall rocker, mood-wise. Quite the opposite. This album simmers in a sort of understated (and supremely tasteful) way. But the point is that Emmylou doesn’t sound like she’s having second thoughts about her substantially altered sound here. She embraces it, lets go of any doubt, and the emotional and aesthetic inertia of the material does the rest. Fuck yeah.

This confidence in apparent in the choice of songs. Emmylou is a major figure in her own right, and she isn’t afraid of tackling songs by some pretty major artists: Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, even Jimi Hendrix. (Neil Young wrote the title track, from which the album took its name; he, Williams, and Earle all show up on here to play or sing, too.) 

For the most part, the songs are recognizable but slightly transformed (much like how the vibe of the album compares to her previous work). Take “Goodbye,” one of my favorite Steve Earle songs and a standout track here. Earle’s original version is pretty spare: just an acoustic guitar or two, a harmonica, and the man himself, sounding like he’s so heartbroken and drunk he can barely get the words out. It’s simple and gorgeous, pure emotion. Emmylou’s version is something else entirely (and this has a lot to do with producer Daniel Lanois). If you turn up the volume for this track, you hear some hand drums and a shaker, kind of a pulsing beat, and Steve Earle picking out the notes of a chord, quietly. Then the guitar stops, he slowly counts off, “1… 2…” and Emmylou interjects with “3” before Earle continues “1234” and the rest of the instrumentation comes in, lush and atmospheric. Was this just some kind of scrap of studio noise they didn’t bother to cut out? Doubtful. This song is about heartache and regret and attempting to move on (“I can’t remember if we said goodbye”) – notice the way Emmylou sort of joins up with Earle counting off, but it immediately falls apart and he “moves on,” counting it off without her? It’s like a memory from a past relationship rushing up to start the song (which is all about remembering), re-enacting that relationship’s demise and then moving us forward in time to the point where the singer can only sit and recollect, dismayed by the abrupt and messy way it all ended. That’s fucking amazing! And when Emmylou sings the line “But I recall, all of them nights down in Mexico, one place I may never go, in my life again,” she does that signature thing where she hits a high note (on “recall”) and her voice just sort of evaporates into an airy whisper. It’s like that memory she’s trying to hold on to is vanishing into thin air. (When Earle sings the line, you can practically smell the tequila on his breath, which works well for his version.)   

I’m not sure if this is the best song on the album, but it’s close – and this is an album with a lot of strong songs. Jimi Hendrix’s “May This Be Love” might seem random, but it blends in with the lush soundscapes of the other songs pretty nicely. I have mixed feelings about the cover of Gillian Welch’s “Orphan Girl,” though. The reason the original works so well (as with most of Welch’s songs) is that it’s so bare and stark; here it’s dressed up with all kinds of percussion and reverb and back-up vocals, and it feels little overdone. And to be honest, I was never a huge fan of the title track, Neil Young’s original version or otherwise. But it’s grown on me – it’s one of those (possible) love songs that Young is so good at writing: a little melancholy and tinged with darkness. That being said, there isn’t really a bad song on here, and the title track “Where Will I Be” (written by Lanois, and recorded by him years later on his own album Here Is What Is) is one of my favorite opening tracks for an album. (In particular check out that syncopated beat that kicks everything off, provided by the great Brian Blade who drops in for this one song, and then is replaced by U2’s Larry Mullen Jr. for the remainder of the album.)

It’s worth mentioning producer Daniel Lanois again – he performs multiple instruments on every track, sings back-up and duet vocals, and wrote some of the material. But the whole vibe of this album is his creation, and if you aren’t the type of person who likes albums that sound “created” in the studio, you might not dig it. But if you appreciate deep textures and recording effects and creative mixing, you’ll enjoy Lanois’s take on this classic voice (see also his Dylan albums, and the newest Neil Young album, itself sort of a tribute to the producer, Le Noise). A nice counterpart to Wrecking Ball is Lanois’s own debut solo album, Acadie, which evokes a similar mood, and is just about as consistent and enduring a recording as this.