Electrifying, scarily powerful and quietly charismatic to the last, Harris runs the rule one final time in Europe over her exceptionally long career.
Perhaps one of the most touching moments of the Emmylou Harris Farewell Tour during her gig in Rotterdam this May came a few minutes after support act Jim Lauderdale had said we should all have our handkerchiefs ready because listening to Harris play live was such a powerful experience, it always made him want to cry: cue some kind member of the audience coming up to the stage edge to hand him a wad of tissues. But frankly, by the end of Harris’ faultlessly performed two-hour-long concert that reviewed her career, in which she has collaborated or sung with just about everybody who’s anybody in americana, all the way back to the late 1960s, probably plenty of the spectators could have done with a packet of Kleenex or three for our tears.
For one thing, from one side to the other of the sold-out 2,000-seater De Doelen, a hall blessed with exactly the kind of excellent acoustics needed to make the night even more special, you could perceive an overarching sense of drawn-out, intense regret that this was one of the very last times Harris would be seen performing in Europe. Yet even as the curtain is set to fall on this facet of her career for good, the talent she has shown for well over half a century now for infusing each song with a grave, often melancholy, richness of expression remained fully on display. Be it her piercingly bleak interpretation of Orphan Girl or as soon as she started with those oh-so-familiar lines of “I don’t want to hear a love song, I got on this airplane just to fly”, from Boulder to Birmingham, written to honour the memory of Gram Parsons, and yet another of the many songs of farewells and loss to figure on a night of farewells, those highest of emotional high points just kept on coming.
“I would play more,” Harris, whose rare gift for charismatic understatement in her between-song patter remained strictly on point, too, and was a treat to hear one last time, said at one break in the music, before adding, a shade wistfully, “but I am 79.” And to be honest, at the start of the concert when there were slight production issues with overly loud drumming and her voice seemed to waver on the high notes, it seemed as if only glimpses of what Harris must have sounded like in her prime might be on offer.
But no. With a little more time to get the sound balance right and her voice in sync, not to mention a hugely effective musical communication between herself and the Red Dirt Boys (Phil Madeira, on keyboards, Will Kimbrough, guitar, Chris Donohue, bass, and Bryan Owings on drums, and Eamon McLoughlin on fiddle and mandolin), everything fell into place. Maybe the fact that Harris wisely opted for a classic, full-band version of the songs that have always formed part of her repertoire, like Pancho and Lefty, helped her steady the ship. (That was preceded by an amusing account of how she and Rodney Crowell had spent half a tour somewhere in the early 1970s trying to remember the verses of a song which Townes van Zandt had only sung them once, one night, as a tryout: it became a shade more famous after that!) But whether it was handling an a cappella version of the gospel Calling My Children Home or blasting through rockier country numbers like Luxury Liner and Two More Bottles of Wine, exploring the pathos and heartache of the slow-burning Red Dirt Girl or reminding the audience of her excellent collaborations with Mark Knopfler via All the Running, in Rotterdam Harris was more than up to all of these tasks, and then some.
Furthermore, on a night where she tried, as she said at some point, to play songs she thought people might want to hear one last time, the way the concert was structured was flawlessly thought out to give each of them the right space, too. From when she strode on stage, silvery locks flowing, and began with the beginning of her career with an acoustic version of Love Hurts (written by the Everly Brothers), and ending with a second encore and rip-roaring version of Chuck Berry’s You Never Can Tell, each song’s position in the concert, as well as its content, made perfect sense.
Covers have always been a staple of Harris’ output, and if the dusting down of George Jones’ One of these Days saw her give a fairly conventional number, musically speaking, a dramatic new lease of life, when she also treated the audience to a brand-new version of Johnny Cash’s Help Him, Jesus, it was heartening to realise there was still room for some exploration of musical pastures news, even on a farewell gig. But where she reminded us of her ability to head off the beaten track with polished brilliance, one of the most memorable songs in a night of many memories came with her version of Steve Earle’s Goodbye. Coming as it does off one of her most complex, subtle albums, Wrecking Ball, the LP itself is widely credited with broadening out the incipient alt. country genre in the mid-1990s towards very different kinds of music. But 30 years on, Goodbye’s agonising narration, told from the point of view of a former drug addict trying to work out the blank spaces of a long-lost relationship, is still as hard-hitting as ever, and its title, of course, couldn’t be more appropriate for a farewell tour. The same kind of throat-tightening moment occurred on Hickory Wind, too, her second-to-last number, and its poignancy and paeans to lost childhood, not to mention its long-absent co-author Gram Parsons, once again remind us that soon Harris will no longer be with us, either, at least on this side of the Atlantic.
Those who have listened to Harris play live before might say so many heart-stoppers in one night is just par for the course. But as a very late newcomer to Harris’ playing live, for this reviewer, even her many albums don’t fully do Harris’ voice justice, which only made hearing her in concert that more special.
For one thing, it’s surely rare to hear a voice so scarily capable of singing multiple notes at the same time; the main one and within that, a rippling series of faintly audible chords. But perhaps the most amazing thing about Harris’ voice, as the De Doelen concert underlined throughout, is the sense of timelessness it somehow embodies. Compare her to another americana great, Lucinda Williams, say, and if Williams’ voice feels earthy and time-worn to an extreme, Harris much clearer, pitch-perfect tones always somehow hover on an invisible borderline between the very spiritual and the very human. Almost too good for this world, you might say, but thankfully for her fans, not quite.
A couple of notes about the other protagonists in the concert. Support act Jim Lauderdale’s 40 minutes of acoustic numbers were competent enough, but considering his huge back catalogue of interesting numbers, disappointingly bland. On the other hand, once Harris was on stage, the Red Dirt Band struck exactly the right note between overly-seeking the limelight in a concert that was essentially a showcasing of Harris’s talents, and failing to provide enough interesting support.
In any case, as we head out into a chilly Rotterdam night and its windswept boulevards of concrete and glass, you can’t help feeling lucky at having been there, even if Harris has just, touchingly and as gracious as ever, thanked the audience for us coming to see her over all these years, too. To go back to Boulder to Birmingham, it would be a shade over the top to think that, with no more Harris concerts to look forward to, “the hardest part is knowing I’ll survive”. But at the same time, it’s a fair bet that amongst the audience in De Doelen, nobody would have missed this last chance to see Harris live in Europe for anything in the world either.
