Spins: Emmylou Harris • Spyboy expanded LP reissue
Emmylou Harris
Spyboy expanded LP reissue
(New West)
After releasing a startlingly potent and career-redefining album, Wrecking Ball, helmed by producer Daniel Lanois in 1995, Emmylou Harris assembled a band she dubbed Spyboy to bring the songs to life on the road. This live album from 1998 documents the Wrecking Ball tour, during which Harris and her Spyboys, including guitarist Buddy Miller, bassist Daryl Johnson, and drummer Brian Blade, brought new songs to life that are considered standouts with 30 years of hindsight. They also reignited songs that were considered classics at the time. Now available on vinyl LP for the first time aside from a Record Store Day release, the album is expanded with the welcome inclusion of five additional songs.
Wrecking Ball reframed Harris’ celebrated voice with heady ambience and atmospherics reminiscent of Lanois’ work with Brian Eno, U2, and Peter Gabriel. One example early in the set is the sparkling “Where Will I Be,” in which Harris’ breathy soprano glides above Johnson’s deep bass and intertwines with his high harmony. Miller’s chiming guitar is rich with heavenly reverb and evanescent delay. Those touches don’t mean that Spyboy had to ditch the inherent twang in Harris’ vintage material. Miller cuts loose with dazzling Telecaster plank-spanking on songs including Rodney Crowell’s rowdy country rocker “I Ain’t Living Long Like This,” while Blade’s snare drum cracks like a whip.
The expanded 19-song track list now features five songs from Wrecking Ball, adding Bob Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand” and Harris’ haunting interpretation of Lucinda Williams’ “Sweet Old World.” A white-hot version of Bill Monroe’s gospel blues “Get Up John” features the band’s spellbinding playing and hillbilly harmony. Miller joins Harris in a duet with a countrified arrangement of Tom Petty’s “Thing About You” from the Heartbreakers’ Hard Promises album. Also present is the gentle and melancholy “All I Left Behind,” written by Harris with the McGarrigle sisters Anna and Kate, who join in tremulous harmony.
Classics and standbys are well represented. Harris returns to “what I like to think of as the beginning” to sing the beautiful heartache of the ballad “Love Hurts.” Miller sings in place of Gram Parsons, while his tremolo guitar blends with Harris’s arpeggiated acoustic guitar. Blade plays a stomping two-beat rhythm for “Wheels,” which leads into the lively country hit “Born to Run” from the 1982 album Cimarron. Harris responds to Blade’s explosive coda with rock-and-roll grit mixed into her pure country voice. The crowd responds with warmth and excitement as Harris leads the band into “Boulder to Birmingham” and its tender elegy to Parsons.
Miller’s wife, singer and songwriter Julie Miller, joins the band to sing her Appalachian-flavored “All My Tears (Be Washed Away)” with Harris. The original Spyboy program crescendos with an expansive cover of Lanois’ captivating and redemptive “The Maker.” Johnson blends his supple five-string bass playing with the deep hum of Taurus pedals. Blade plays a jazz-inflected shuffle. Miller coaxes languid melodies from his strings. With Harris’s expressive voice rising like a prayer, the blend is intoxicating.
27 years following the initial CD release of Spyboy, thanks are again due to Buddy Miller for bringing his recording equipment onto the road in the late ’90s. This is a rare, live document. It’s essential listening for any Harris fan, capturing a pivotal season in her career. (newwestrecords.com)
– Jeff Elbel
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