Where Will I Be - Emmylou Harris - Daniel Lanois - Live TV performance BBC

I admit that I have a tendency to seek the new when on my musical jaunts.* I believe that popular music genres work best with an element of freshness to them. Music from back in the day works best for me when it has had time to almost be out of my brain. To me a version of Hell would be always hearing music that you have heard before, as recently as yesterday. I think I have experienced this slightly by hearing an oldies radio station in Los Angeles drifting from a neighbour's yard. Yikes and horrors...

And then there is "Wrecking Ball" by Emmylou Harris and Daniel Lanois. I don't think it's possible for these songs to ever be out of my brain. Recorded and released in 1995 it had such a delicious, transcendent mixture of emotion, tradition and brave new directions wrapped into song, it struck us with a force that has never left us. 19 years on, the newly remastered reissue arrived in my mailbox on it's release date last week. It sounds still fresh and still powerful
My wife had developed a fierce bond with Daniel Lanois's "Acadie" recording as it became the soundtrack to her first pregnancy. Wrecking Ball had the same magic with the incredible addition of Emmylou Harris' voice.





Tomorrow night at Massey Hall in Toronto Emmylou and Daniel are performing this recording onstage. We are fortunate enough to have tickets and simply can't wait.

Gillian Welch, a songwriter and singer I have long admired and who swims in these same waters (her song "Orphan Girl" is on the recording), writes a beautiful appreciation in the liner notes of the new version.
"But visiting again with Wrecking Ball - this magnificently recorded document of Emmylou Harris's voice - I find myself marvelling at that which soars and crashes, breaks, and takes flight again. There is something wind-whipped about it. It has the paradoxical intimacy of the lone figure of the heath, the affinity one feels in wilderness, no matter how vast, for all violence and tenderness, all the ravages and salvations inherent in any breathtaking landscape. It is what holds us and feeds us as no table can. Perhaps there are hungers that only Art and Nature and Spirit can fill. On the day that Wrecking Ball came out we all had a feast. "

I can only add that feasts are best when attached to a spirit of celebration. Otherwise how could a feast just go on and on? This will be the first Passover Seder that Hindy and I have missed since travelling in Europe in 1988. Passover is not something that we would pass up just for a night of entertainment. We expect a powerful concert tomorrow. If you are not familiar with the recording, I hope it finds you.





* Musical jaunts used to be actual jaunts. Record store journies meant transportation with the time spent anticipating and then hauling purchases home. Now it is computer clicks, downloads and when I rarely purchase an actual recording it is from a record company who has me on their email list and it arrives in the mail. So replace jaunt with short walk to the mailbox or a series of mouse clicks. I am now in search of a suitable digital replacement for "jaunt". Stay tuned.