An audience with queen of country

By PETER CALDER

The man in the hotel foyer eyes my notebook and drawls his question through an extravagant, walrus moustache.

"Are you here for Emmylou?" he asks, naming the star whose tour he is managing, though it comes out sounding like "Ah yew heah fuh Emmalew?"

You can bet I am. I might not walk all the way from Boulder (Colorado) to Birmingham (Alabama) to talk to Emmylou Harris, but when she's just up the street and she's agreed, at the last minute, to give just one interview (she ended her New Zealand tour in Auckland last night), there's only one answer to the moustached one's question.

This is, after all, the queen of country music, a legend through three decades not just as a performer but as an "incomparable bandleader" (so said Billboard magazine) who has tapped and nurtured the talents of names such as Ricky Skaggs, Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill, Emory Gordy jun, Hank DeVito and Albert Lee.

And, still touring after all these years, she's been in the country not just rifling through her back pages but on the back of a brand-new album, Red Dirt Girl, which showcases her extraordinary ability to reinvent herself. Long an accomplished interpreter of others' work (everyone from Merle Haggard to Lennon and McCartney) she's now mostly singing her own songs from an album at once moody, poetic and inventive.

The woman I meet is a strikingly youthful 54-year-old, stray strands of her piled-up ash-blond hair hanging over eyes half-hidden by tinted glasses. Those eyes dart around the room a lot, but the speaking voice is as gentle and dulcet as the singing one.

Settling down to talk she lights up a bidi, one of those thin, tapered Indian cigarettes, and shrugs when I wonder about the effect of tobacco on her singing voice.

"I don't smoke much and I enjoy it. I love salt too and everybody's against salt. Restaurants don't season their food any more so I carry my own salt with me. I salt everything. It's the way I was raised: salt and pepper on cantaloupe, salt on watermelon.

"It's a southern thing," she says with a soft smile, making "thing" rhyme with "tang."

Alabama-born Harris was the daughter of a marine pilot who moved around a lot. That early rootlessness perhaps explains why she is, in her own words, "a touring junkie."

Harris came to attention with the 1975 album Pieces of the Sky. It was not her first, but the first she claims. She says 1969's Gliding Bird was the work of a woman who "wasn't really formed as an artist." Pieces contained only one Harris-penned track - the heart-rending Boulder to Birmingham (a tribute to Flying Burrito Brother Gram Parsons, her lover and early mentor, who had died of a drug and alcohol overdose). Now a quarter-century later, Red Dirt Girl contains only one song she didn't have a hand in writing. The late rebirth as a fully fledged songwriter was born of necessity, she explains.

In the mid 90s, country radio's increasingly youth-oriented format was squeezing out a generation of veteran country artists. Harris acknowledged the change gracefully and proceeded to reinvent herself in stunning fashion with Wrecking Ball, the Grammy-winning 1995 album produced by Daniel Lanois, marking a radical shift away from country music. And it was that album that inspired Harris to write this one.

"Wrecking Ball was a peak of sorts for me," she says. "Something was given birth to and if I had gone back in and done another 10 great songs it would have suffered from being the son of Wrecking Ball. I had to raise the bar, to make it difficult for myself.

"It's very easy for me to interpret other people's songs. To give myself permission to come back into the studio, I thought if I could write half a record - I never dreamed I would write the entire thing - I could do that."

Like Linda Ronstadt, with whom she has often collaborated, Harris was responsible for reinventing the craft of harmony singing in the 70s and 80s, creating lines that became not just backing vocals but a string thread in the fabric of the music.

"I love harmony singing," she says, recalling an appearance on Bob Dylan's 1975 album Desire as being nerve-racking because she was "just struggling to keep up."

And the woman with a voice like an angel is a passionate defender of the vocal style of the man with the nasal whine and chesty hoot.

"Dylan is very underrated as a singer," she says. "His phrasing is extraordinary, the things he does with language. He's just a great singer."

Harris' constant touring schedule - she begins a three-month American tour in late May - reflects her passion for taking her music to her fans, and she has no immediate plans to slow down.

"It's hard to strike the balance between working too little and working too much," she says. "But I've been given a gift and as long as I have something to say, why would I retire or even have vacations. If you added up the dates I probably tour less than many other artists, I've just been doing it a long time."

When she's not touring, she's gathering music to write - or writing her own, a process she still struggles to understand.

"Writing a song can take years or a couple of days. It's still a mystery to me. But I do know that it doesn't happen unless you give yourself some space and actually start flexing those muscles and not be afraid of the void where nothing happens. You just have to keep working. And it's great work if you can get it."