Recording - March 2012 - 12

mmylou Harris has been singing, songwriting, and creating beautiful music for nearly five decades. Her latest album, Hard Bargain, is up for a Grammy® this year, but it is remarkable not only for its beautiful and haunting music but also for how it was created. Emmylou performed the entire record under conditions most fancy recording studios would shy away from—her performances were kept honest and real by having her record her vocals and guitar at the same time, while playing along with fellow musicians/engineers Jay Joyce and Giles Reaves in a single open tracking room. Jay is well known in his own right as a musician, producer and engineer for artists ranging from Cage The Elephant and the Derek Trucks Band to Tim Finn and Patty Griffin. He’s played with the Wallflowers, Iggy Pop, and many others. Giles is a multi-instrumentalist and audio engineer who divides his time between his studio in Salt Lake City and various studios in Nashville. He hit the Billboard charts in 1992 with his album Sea Of Glass, and has worked with dozens of artists as an engineer and backing player since then. He also writes the occasional article for Recording. The recording sessions for Hard Bargain took place at Jay’s Tragedy/Tragedy recording studio in Nashville, aided by Giles and by tracking engineer Jason Hall. I had the pleasure of talking to Emmylou, Jay, Giles, and Jason about the process, and gleaned some great insights on the strange and wonderful relationship between the songwriter and the studio.—PV

Emmylou Harris
Typically when you write a new song, is it just you and your guitar? Emmylou Harris: Oh, yeah. That’s all I am capable of doing comfortably. Do you do any home recording with, say, a laptop, to get your ideas down? No, I don’t. I still use one of those portable cassette players. I don’t know what I will do when they are no longer around! Basically I have always depended on people who have technical abilities to take care of the whole recording thing. I made the decision long ago that I didn’t want to fill my brain up with that. I would just get people who knew what they were doing and trust them, and it’s worked out pretty well for me. How did you develop the songs for Hard Bargain? I would keep Jay apprised of what I was working on; he would come over to the house sometimes and I would show him stuff. Then when I had a few songs ready, I came over to his place and we just put them down, again just guitar and vocal, mainly just for him to put his thinking cap on for ideas he might have.
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And of course Jay made some great changes, like on “The Road”—I had initially played that in very folk-picking open tuning and Jay suggested more of a Neil Young rock ‘n roll ballad kind of feel. He said I would not have to sing it any differently and he was right. At first it made me a little nervous, because I had written it a certain way and I usually bow to that, but that’s what’s great about a great producer— they have an overview on things. They can get you out of your safety box and yet still keep the sanctity and message of the song. They can add to it in a way you never thought of because you may be too subjective. When you are working on a song, do you hear arrangement ideas in your head? Not really, I am concentrating only on getting the song. Now once we are into recording I might get an idea for this instrument or that instrument or whatever, but I will say, on this record, pretty much Jay was at the helm. When was it decided to work as a trio rather than bring in a full band of session musicians? That was Jay’s idea. We had done a few little one-off projects before, like a song for a movie soundtrack, and that had worked out very well. He said, “Let’s start with just this small group, and if we have to bring somebody in, we will.” You never want to close yourself off to opportunities, but as we got into it I realized there was something about me doing all the background vocals

Recording - March 2012

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