Friday, June 20, 2008

EMMYLOU HARRIS"All I Intended to Be"Nonesuch

WHEN YOU'VE been as quietly, consistently brilliant as Emmylou Harris has for the past three decades and change, you kind of sacrifice the ability to blow your audience's minds with a jaw-dropping new release. Harris's new "All I Intended to Be" is another album of modest pleasures, but that's no mean compliment. In the half-decade since "Stumble Into Grace," her most recent solo effort, she has entered her 60s, and in April she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. So it's hard to resist reading the album, which includes among its baker's dozen tracks five written or co-written by Harris, as a kind of summing up.

Her soaring vocals are as bright and warm as ever, but an elegiac, autumnal feel pervades: The opener, "Shores of White Sand," wouldn't sound out of place at a wake. On Patty Griffin's "Moon Song," she begs, "Time, go easy on me tonight." The collection is cohesive enough, sonically and thematically, that you'd never guess it was recorded in spurts in three years or that no conscious design links its eight cover songs by the likes of Merle Haggard, Billy Joe Shaver and Tracy Chapman; they're just a bunch of tunes Harris has always wanted to sing. She has always had a knack for making others' songs her own, so much so that she doesn't bother to change the gender of the first-person narrator of Mark Germino's "Broken Man's Lament." Despite her angelic voice and comely visage, we always knew Harris was one of the guys.

-- Chris Klimek

Appearing Sunday at Wolf Trap (703-255-1900,http://www.wolftrap.org). Show starts at 8 p.m.