Emmylou Harris’s productivity puts the listener in the position of a man who wakes with a nightingale singing at his window every morning. Incandescently beautiful yes, but you can get used to a good thing.
Hard Bargain is Harris’ 24th album, and there are no radical stylistic U-turns or departures. Emmylou is not about to go R&B or ambient crunk in order to reboot her career. Hard Bargain therefore is an unpretentious if unambitious modern roots record, recorded with a three-piece band, but delicately layered and textured.
As always with Emmylou, the voice is beyond reproach, so the quality of the material is crucial. A set of mostly self-penned tunes, Hard Bargain finds her in reflective mood, ruminating on fallen comrades like Gram Parsons (‘The Road’) and Kate McGarrigle (‘Darlin’ Kate’). There are keening country waltzes like ‘Goodnight Old World’ and first-person narrative ballads like ‘My Name Is Emmett Till’, which, in the old days, would have been called a protest song. Harris by her own admission favours slow airs; producer Jay Joyce occasionally pushes her into mid-tempo chugger territory, often to no good end (the theme-park honky tonk of ‘Six White Cadillacs’).
There’s little to find fault with in this record, but even the long time devotee is left with the feeling that Emmylou can do this in her sleep. Hard Bargain walks a thin line between the bland and the sublime.