Only CDs Is Sounding Like These # 20: Emmylou Harris, Red Dirt Girl (2000)

A new occasional series - CDs are coming back baby! And I’m here for it. BIGTIME! Also, some albums just REALLY suit the format, right

I knew a bit about Emmylou Harris before Red Dirt Girl, I’d been told to check out Wrecking Ball (1995) and of course I did, the promise of her singing Neil Young’s title song was enough to have me interested there. And I knew about her legacy, who she was, who she had been. But the real thing that made me a fan was Red Dirt Girl.

And the absolute timing of it all.

It arrived on the back of Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions — an album of songs (half covers, half originals) by Harris and Linda Ronstadt. An absolute classic, which, again, I’d bought on the back of Wrecking Ball. I knew Dolly Parton had done a couple of Trio albums with them both, but that felt a bit like a novelty show, Western Wall felt deeper. In much the same way that I preferred the live album of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson sharing songs to the full Highwayman showcase where those two were joined by Waylon and Kristofferson.

Red Dirt Girl feels like a full and proper career-restart. An artist at the very start of the late peak, so much so that every album she released after it (and there were plenty of good ones) owes a debt to this, and more so to this than any other record in her catalogue.

I became a huge fan overnight, I had the two Best Of volumes on vinyl, but I ordered up a bunch of the earlier albums on CD too. And the concert arrived right at that perfect time when I was just becoming a super fan:

It was such a great gig. And I got to write about it for this website at the time (LOOP) and it was the first time they put my review on the front page of their little corner of the internet. As a budding review writer I felt I’d been given the actual front page of the internet!

I’ve been listening to Red Dirt Girl a bit lately, after years of just letting it be.

It’s such a perfectly built album, producer Malcolm Burn had learned well under the tutelage of Daniel Lanois, and continues to shape Harris’s sound in the way that Lanois first recast it on Wrecking Ball. But here is where Emmylou really steps up as a writer. Such a gifted harmony and lead singer, she had been able to rely on her voice over her writing. When you sing like an angel you can go with any angle. But here, now, she had something to say. Late middle age gave her pause to reflect on the loss of various people in her life, the loss of friendships, the memories of childhood, the movement of her own life through music.

It’s the spiritual cousin to Willie Nelson’s Teatro and Spirit albums for me. It’s the continuation of a new high level after Western Wall, in much the same way that Lou Reed followed New York with Songs For Drella.

I love that sort of thing.

Bob Dylan and Patti Smith are examples of artists that “came back” in a similar way with a single album setting the course for a new direction.

But with Red Dirt Girl the other thing is it somehow sits — genre-less — as the great mature adult pop album of its era. Obviously it’s a little bit country, because you can’t be Emmylou and not be a little bit country (the very name Emmylou gives the clue if nothing else) but this isn’t quite or just a “country album”. It’ s more than that. As well as being a shining example of exactly that.

It’s a contemporary folk album. It’s a little bit rock. And it was enough to somehow signpost the eventual collaboration with Mark Knopfler too, feeling spiritually connected (Mature Adult Pop Albums) to his Sailing to Philadelphia album from the same era.

I love this album so much.

I bought it on CD for $1 — after long ago selling my expensive vinyl version. Something about having the CD makes the most sense. This is how I first heard it. I reviewed it. Reviewed the gig. And I played this album so often across so many years, before filing it away “for reference”. When I got rid of it I almost instantly missed it. And I’m glad to have it back in my world once again.

There are other great late-career albums by Harris. But this one is the absolute flag in the ground on the top of a new hill for her.