Ecstatic Moments (1): Emmylou Harris on “We Are Nowhere And It’s Now” (Bright Eyes)
by Jay Savage
“She is a great solo artist and singer but really - and to her added credit - she is one of the greatest backing singers of the past half century, time and again doing very, very little it may seem to add so, so much, transforming the modest song into the memorable recording. ”
The singer Emmylou Harris has a fabulous, unmistakable voice. Her long and pretty majestic career is at one with that distinguished, unhurried, searching voice. As singular and gifted in her way as Karen Carpenter or Stevie Nicks she is a communicator of vast messages concealed in the songs she appears on or performs; never sly in her delivery she has none of the gothic mannerisms that more showy singers resort to and she has built an adoring audience over 40 years.
She has of late been immortalised in "Emmylou" by the Swedish duo First Aid Kit, a lovely tune that is shared like a secret handshake by the Harris faithful (‘though, as a recording, it cannot aspire to the divine heights of its subject). And she is beloved for her own records and performances, also appearing alongside and collaborating with a long list of the illustrious and the inspired, on many very good and great albums, maybe a dozen true classic albums, thousands of songs.
Emmylou is a great solo artist and singer but really - and to her added credit - she is one of the greatest backing singers of the past half century, time and again doing very, very little it may seem to add so, so much, transforming the modest song into the memorable recording. Time and time again great, good or merely mediocre material is enriched by the element and elegance of Emmylou.
I Am Wide Awake, It's Morning, the album Conor Oberst made with Bright Eyes in 2005, is his head and shoulders masterpiece and there is a moment on the second song, “We Are Nowhere And It’s Now” - literally one, certainly less than two seconds long - in which Emmylou slips a lit up shadow into Oberst’s pensive self-involved, but not uninvolving, composition.
Harris breathes her presence into, and has elevated, countless recordings. She is magnificent all over Desire, and her vocal flashes behind Dylan on the unreleased, original recording of “Hurricane” is such that she wrests attention from the singer and the song's urgency. It wasn’t there in the searing version that opens Dylan’s great 1976 album but listen to "Oh Sister" or "One More Cup of Coffee" and then imagine those songs without her.
On “We Are Nowhere…” she shimmers like a ghost as Oberst's anguished outpouring turns its corner with the words
"...and like a ten minute dream in the passenger seat/
While the world goes sliding by/
I haven't been gone very long but it/
seems like a life time…”
Harris takes wing beside Oberst's plaintive delivery and at the end of that first verse holds on for an exquisite, uncanny moment after he sighs out. In that final syllable of the word “lifetime”, in that abbreviated suspended moment, an entire plane of meaning, unsayable and thrilling - a whole lifetime of it - is sewn into the hem of Oberst's patchwork cloth.
Click here for a playlist highlighting Emmylou Harris’s gift as a vocal accompanist and duettist including “Spanish Dancer” with Rodney Crowell.