Emmylou Harris - Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town

So, one of my real criticisms of country albums is that they are disproportionately pop albums. All the songs are there to be hits, obviously not all of them will be, but that's the only reason they are there. There's little continuity, no proper narrative structure (i don't mean a story, i mean an unfolding series of events/action). Usually, pop albums amount to a day in the life with ADD. Country, more than any other genre is a hardcore business based purely on record sales. That's not a bias, that's an objective fact; Country stars are either professional songwriters (as an actual job in an office with a paycheck) turned performer, or a groomed celebrity from the start. Country, in any of it's various flavors, is not an experimental or adventurous genre, it's a lifestyle genre with a real and discerning demographic, and if it's not going to make money it isn't worth publishing.

That's why Emmylou Harris's Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town intrigues me. She's a great singer, with a huge arsenal of vocal inflections. She can be soft and breathy, she can creak like the wisest of grandmothers, and she can hone that rasp to a razor's edge when the occasion warrants it. None of that is particularly strange. What is strange is what happens in the background. The acoustic guitars are clean and quite gorgeous, and that makes everything else sound insane. The electric instruments are so drenched in effects (phaser, chorus, reverb, tremolo) that they take on a real synthesizer quality that i haven't heard before.

I already said Emmylou Harris is great (and the songs themselves are pretty thematically progressive and surprisingly feminist, in my opinion), but this album is a masterclass in unorthodox orchestration. The guitars are soaking wet, there are accordions and sax and strings, and the licks are insane, but not show-boaty. Let's just say that pedal steel and tenor saxophone make a surprisingly enjoyable combination.

The official designation for this album is Country-Rock, but not in the way you'd expect. It's not southern rock like Skynyrd or Molly Hatchett, it's more like they just plugged into whatever gear the new wave band before them was using, pedals and all. Maybe there was a whole scene in the late 70s that i just don't know about, but shoegaze country is not something i've ever heard before. I quite like it, though.

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