EMMYLOU HARRIS
All I Intended to Be
(Nonesuch)
A little context before launching into a rush of superlatives over Emmylou Harris‘ new stunner, All I Intended to Be: back in 1995, Harris made an abrupt – and enormously successful – career turn with the release of her classic Wrecking Ball (Elektra), a haunting, endlessly layered collection of shimmers and swirls deeply steeped in atmosphere by producer Daniel Lanois. Largely gone was the country traditionalism associated with her most well-known work, and instead she’d offered up one of the decade’s boldest, most compellingly adventurous torch-carriers for the “cosmic American music” tag coined by former collaborator Gram Parsons several decades before.
While obviously drawing heavily from folk and country, Wrecking Ball could never fit the purist’s definition of either. Rather, this was something truly deserving of the label “visionary,” having re-positioned roots music out of the farms and the forests and into the heavens. Nothing else sounded quite like it, and the album not only solidified Harris’ standing as a peerless interpreter – refer to her covers of Jimi Hendrix’s “May This Be Love” and the Neil Young-penned title track if you need reminding – but it also marked the start of a tremendous creative burst for the artist, both as a songwriter and as a collaborator.
The albums that followed – 2000’s Red Dirt Girl and 2003’s Stumble Into Grace (both Nonesuch) – showed no let-up in Harris’ inspired momentum, serving up considerably fewer cover songs in favor of adventurous, highly personal songwriting. (One obvious highlight: Red Dirt Girl‘s “Bang The Drum Slowly,” a grand, ethereal weeper written for her father, who had passed away around the time of Wrecking Ball.) Teaming up with Luscious Jackson’s Jill Cunniff proved to be a particular left-field triumph, as evidenced by the hypnotic groove of 2000’s “J’Ai Fait Tout.” Meanwhile, both albums carried on with a refined vision of Wrecking Ball‘s lush whirl-and-eddy aesthetic, with producer Malcolm Burn inserting the occasional drum loop and world-music element into the mix to tremendous effect. In short, the past decade-plus of Harris’ career should be considered nothing less than a renaissance – quite wowing, considering the breadth of her catalog, but entirely true. If anything, the vocalist is enjoying a higher profile now than she ever has before.