Until very recently, no one expected something "new" from an artist. He/she did what he/she did, and, over time, with work and talent and increasing mastery, the art got better and better. But it didn't get "different" and there was no expectation of novelty --- no one wrote about "Bleak House" that Dickens had failed to make a stylistic leap over "David Copperfield".
Emmylou Harris is an Old School musician in many ways, but especially in this --- she's plowed the same field for almost all her career. There have been modest detours, but nothing requiring her to change her hair or buy a drum machine. She just sings American Roots music, straight ahead and unadorned.
American Roots music isn't country, pop or rock, though it's not ashamed to borrow from those styles. It's not bluegrass, gospel, folk or Cajun, though there are elements. To its practitioners, it's the authentic heart of the heartland, songs that could only come from here, sounds that remind us who we are. Soul music, if you will.
Emmylou Harris is the high priestess of this music, and on her 21st release she does it as well as anyone ever will. To those who do not worship at her shrine or listen only casually to her music, it may sound like just another Emmylou Harris record: that exquisite voice, evocative lyrics, flawless instrumentation and angelic harmonies. Yes, it is, and "Great Expectations" is just another Dickens novel.
In today's lost and destructive music business, it takes ferocious courage and massive self-assurance to put out a record of quiet beauty and then to put a title like "All I Intended to Be" on it. That's a statement, a stake in the ground --- Emmylou Harris may seem uncommonly modest and self-effacing, but this is her "My Way".
These songs were recorded over four years. The producer was Brian Ahern, her former husband and collaborator on her first 11 albums. The musicians may be well-known to music fans --- the singers include Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Buddy Miller and the McGarrigle Sisters --- but there are an equal number of lesser-known singers and musicians who appear simply because they're dear to Emmylou. And the songs? "I've always seen myself as a relentless song-finder, a singer of other people's work whom I admire greatly, and an occasional songwriter," she says, putting herself last and least, as is her custom.
The songwriters are at once venerable and esoteric: Billy Joe Shaver, Merle Haggard, Patty Griffin, Mark Germino, Jack Wesley Routh. The song you probably know is by Tracy Chapman: "All That You Have Is Your Soul." That could easily have been the title of this CD. It is certainly the theme.
She may be uncommonly modest, but this is her "My Way"
Lovely, but a bit uninspired
