As Emmylou Harris tours Australia for the first time in over a decade, she speaks to Heidi Maier about life, loss and songwriting.

THOUGH revered alt-country and alt-folk singer/songwriter Emmylou Harris has been recording since the early 1970s, when she rose to prominence after collaborating with country legend Gram Parsons, hers is a career largely built on masterfully interpreting the material of others.

Harris, a 12-time Grammy winner, lacks no ability as a songwriter, having penned three brilliant and evocative albums – 2000’s Red Dirt Girl, 2003’s Stumble Into Grace and 2011’s Hard Bargain – but it is a process she admits she finds “tremendously difficult.”

Unlike many performers, Harris isn’t able to jot down the odd lyric or lay down melodies while touring, recording or even going about the stuff of everyday life during her rare downtime.

She needs, she concedes, with a wry laugh, “structure and lots of it.”

“I don’t do enough of it that I have a method, although I do usually have to clear a big space in my schedule where I don’t do any touring and I don’t do any activities as far as singing on other people’s records … I don’t do anything much but write songs when I am doing that,” Harris says.

“With this last record [Hard Bargain] I took three months, which ended up only being two months because something good did come along. There’s no point my getting into it, so I’ll just say that sometimes there are things you have to break your own rules for, you know?”

Still, Harris says those two months did put her on the path to writing the album.

“It got me started, sure, and that was the important thing. Sometimes I start with lyrics, this time a lot of the songs came from the guitar. I was working a lot with open tuning and that’s not really something, in songwriting, that I’ve done before,” she continues.

“I think the man thing is I have to say to myself: ‘Right – now it’s time to put on the writer’s hat and let everything fall by the wayside.’ That’s kind of what I did and got the majority of the songs. And then, later on, after I got those muscles all warmed up again, I wrote a few more songs.”

Of the 13 songs on Hard Bargain, Harris wrote 10 and there is a thread of mortality, loss and grief that runs through the album as a whole.

Sadly, neither loss nor grief is new to Harris.

She was only in her 20s when Parsons, her beloved friend, collaborator and mentor, died from an accidental drug and alcohol overdose in 1973 and the loss of him hit her hard, its legacy ongoing.

He is memorialised on Hard Bargain’s ‘The Road,’ a self-penned song on which she sings:  “I wandered in the wilderness, for a while I was so lost … So I took what you left me, put it to some use / When looking for an answer with those three chords and the truth … For you put me on that path, how could I refuse? / And I spend my whole life out here, working out the blues.”

Harris’ longtime friend, Canadian folk maven Kate McGarrigle, the mother of contemporary singer/songwriters Martha and Rufus Wainwright, who died in 2010 after battling a rare form of cancer, is also remembered, on the beautiful, elegiac, hymn-like ‘Darlin’ Kate.’

Though she penned the bulk of the material comprising her most recent album, Harris also covered a couple of songs: the title track, from Canada’s Ron Sexsmith, and another song, called ‘Cross Yourself.’

“I still covered a couple of songs because there are some songs you can’t resist. I feel quite lucky, in a way, that I’ve never felt the need to record my own material. I mean, if that were the case, then there’d be a whole lot fewer Emmylou Harris records out in the world,” she laughs.

“For so much of my career, I’ve covered other people’s songs and I think it’s better to record a song that somebody else wrote that is great than write and record a mediocre song of your own. You could write a song, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to record it! I have more than learned that lessons over the years!”

How, though, does she choose which songs she’ll cover.

“The song is right there and so is the emotional impact it’s going to have. The resonance is there, you hear the song, and you’re struck by it. I do think quite often about how to describe the feeling and I still don’t know how to, all these years later, other than to say that the song has you. It has its impact and you think: ‘That’s the story, I have to tell that story,’” Harris muses.

“It’s definitely a gut-feeling. It’s very much a gut thing – it’s a song that resonates with you or moves you, it’s a song that touches you, it’s a song that you want to sing and you want to make your own. There’s to a certain greediness attached to it, too, if I’m honest about it. There’s very much that element of knowing immediately: ‘I want that one! I want that one for myself.’”

A chunk of Harris’ career, too, has seen her collaborate, both often and fruitfully, with others.

In the studio, she’s sung with Ryan Adams, Tracy Chapman, Bob Dylan, Patty Griffin, Mark Knopfler, Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, Dolly Parton, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt and Neil Young, to name but a few.

Over the decades, she’s hit the road for tours with a superb roster of artists that has included Shawn Colvin, Elvis Costello, Griffin, Knopfler, Buddy and Julie Miller, David Rawlings and Gillian Welch.

“You don’t know what a collaboration is going to be like or what you’re going to come up with. You get asked, you consider it, you give them a yes, you say to yourself: ‘Well, sure, I’m in, lets see what we come up with.’ That’s a different relationship but there’s a certain amount of trust involved. Again, it’s very much a gut thing once you find yourself there, with the person or the people involved,” she recalls.

“When you’re a singer and you got out onstage, or you start a project, you start a project and, like I said a moment ago, sure, you have ideas and hopes for what you think you’d like to see come of it, but there is a huge element of faith involved. I won’t say luck, because sometimes luck can sort of conjure up images in people’s minds of something just happening, of no real time or effort being involved in the process, but faith is definitely a huge part of the process.”

For Harris, who tours pretty regularly and relentlessly, the experience of playing live is still one she enjoys. But, known for her pure, crystalline vocals, the 65-year-old says that one of her priorities is taking care of her voice.

“The only problem with touring is that I can only sing for certain amount of time and I wish I could sing for five hours, you know? I really do. I would love to do more songs but we do have to remember that the voice is a muscle, the vocal chords are a muscle, and you have to take care of them, so, really, about an hour-and-half or an hour-and-forty-five-minutes a night is the limit that you can do,” she notes.

“Especially if, like me, you know, I’ll do three shows night after night and then maybe have the one-day off. I have come to be very conscious of the fact that the voice is an instrument and you do have to be careful with it and take care of it. You have to try and find a set that somehow works for that night, that gets all the emotion in there, the peaks and the troughs, the slow songs and that is unique to that particular audience that night.”

Hard Bargain is out now through Nonesuch/Warner Music Australia and Emmylou Harris & Her Red Dirt Boys play Jupiters Theatre at Jupiters Casino, Gold Coast, on Friday 16 November.