Wednesday, April 26, 2023

The Life & Songs of Emmylou Harris: An All-Star Concert Celebration

From 2016. The attraction is just as much the truly all-star gathering of performers as the songs themselves - mostly not written by Harris herself but nonetheless strongly associated with her. 

The stand-outs for me are Holly Williams and Chris Coleman's "Orphan Girl" (an outlier in the sense that for me it will always be completely a Gillian Welch song, but consistent with much of the rest of the set in that it feels like a modern-day standard), Mary Chapin Carpenter and Vince Gill's "All the Roadrunning", Alison Krauss's predictably beautiful but still very beautiful take on "Till I Gain Control Again" (which she's also recorded in studio since) and the everyone-at-once "Boulder to Birmingham" which is an iconic moment even among icons in Harris's back catalogue.