Emmylou Harris is the queen of the midtempo lament. The 20 tracks on her new retrospective Heartaches & Highways all adhere to a similar metronomic setting, somewhere between a country ballad and a church hymn-- steady, patient, and reserved, not really slow but certainly not fast. "I don't have that many up-tempo songs," she confesses to Robert K. Oermann in the liner notes. In a sense this plays to her strengths and allows her to draw out every note so that her ragged, dignified voice can wring as much pain from the syllables as possible. Kicking off Heartaches & Highways, "Love Hurts", her duet with Gram Parsons, bursts with exquisite heartbreak, so tended and curated that it sounds museum-worthy. Following that song is "Boulder to Birmingham", which Harris wrote for Parsons following his death in 1973. Those two songs are about as perfectly sad and weepy as you could ever hope for, and the circumstances of their recording give them an extra punch, although "Boulder to Birmingham" seems to be missing something essential, and after a few listens you realize it's Parsons' voice.
The 18 songs that follow never quite reach these musical heights or emotional depths, but do we really expect them to? In the ensuing 30 years, Harris has gone out and come back into fashion, her jet-black hair has turned alluringly silver, and she has recorded more than 20 mostly solid albums and countless collaborations, most of which are chronicled on Heartaches & Highways. Her voice blends mesmerically with Roy Orbison's gentle warble on "That Lovin' You Feelin' Again", and Harris re-creates 1960s girl-group harmonies with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt on their gentle cover of Phil Spector's "To Know Him Is to Love Him". Her collaboration with producer Daniel Lanois on 1995's Wrecking Ball-- represented here by the Gillian Welch cover "Orphan Girl"-- reinvigorated her career with its darker, less traditional sounds, but it also set the tone for every album since, which all seem to prize atmosphere as much as songs.
Over three-and-a-half decades, Harris has exhibited an exceptional taste in covers. Those included on Heartaches & Highways are deep-catalog picks from established artists, avoiding obvious choices or previous hits. Harris recorded Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho & Lefty" before it was a hit for Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson and gives their more popular version a serious run for its money. In addition to providing impeccable material, these covers often allow her to step outside of her midtempo comfort zone: she retains the skipping rhythms of the Louvin Brothers' "If I Could Only Win Your Love" and even quickens her pace for Delbert McClinton's "Two More Bottles of Wine".
Harris's gift for inspired covers culminates with the collection's only new track, a version of Randy Sharp's "The Connection" that teams Harris with original producer Brian Ahern and early collaborator Fayssoux Starling. It's yet another midtempo song, a downbeat number that might sound better on an album that wasn't entirely comprised of downbeat numbers. And that's the crucial flaw in Heartaches & Highways: It implies that Harris's talents were limited to a certain breed of song, and while these twenty tracks all prove dynamic showcases for her singular voice, they barely hint at her considerable range of abilities and interests.
