In 1995, Emmylou Harris broke the mold with Wrecking Ball, an expansive, atmospheric record that redefined not only her own career but the bounds of what a country album could be. Pulling influences from folk, rock and experimental music, the record provided a guiding light for the then-nascent Americana movement. It also marked the start of a new era for Harris, who stopped trying to court country radio during its press cycle. Instead, she brought the record to life with pop producer Daniel Lanois, as well as featured guest artists including Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Neil Young and jazz drummer Brian Blade.
When it came time to tour the album, she didn’t want to just do “Wrecking Ball Live,” as she puts it in a recent conversation with the Scene that Buddy Miller joins her in. Lanois recruited the live band’s rhythm section for the tour — bassist Darrell Johnson and drummer (and brother to Brian) Brady Blade — and temporarily stepped in himself on lead guitar and backing vocals. When it was time for Lanois to step away, Harris recruited Miller to take over. “I knew that I had to have Buddy Miller,” she says.
The band took the name Spyboy, a Mardi Gras term that Harris and Miller say was explained to the band by Johnson, a Louisiana native, as a “sort of troublemaker or jester” who leads a parade. It’s a fitting name for a group that bucked the traditional tour band format, choosing instead to create something new. They heightened the experimental psychedelia from Wrecking Ball, spinning some tracks into extended, improvisational jam sessions, and brought in new material from the pages of music history and Harris’ own career — so much that they never played the same set twice.
This work yielded Spyboy, a live album released in 1998 that compiles performances from throughout the tour, which Harris says captures a “particularly special” time in her career. It gets a long-overdue reissue Thursday via New West. Wednesday, a new documentary called Spyboy: Live at the Exit/In — featuring remastered live footage from a 1998 show and new commentary by Harris — screens at the Belcourt, with Harris and Miller on hand for a Q&A.
Harris recently appeared at Nashville’s second ‘No Kings’ rally for a performance of “Tennessee Rise” alongside Allison Russell, Devon Gilfillian, Julie Williams and Denitia, and she calls music for a cause her “way of giving back.” Proceeds from the Belcourt screening will benefit Harris’ dog rescue organization, Bonaparte’s Retreat. “A lot of my time is spent raising money for the dogs,” she says.
Like any good live album, Spyboy features beloved selections from the album being toured, in this case Wrecking Ball. But it also further showcases Harris’ eclectic sense of curation — there’s a take on Ralph Stanley’s “Green Pastures,” a revival of her own ballad “Boulder to Birmingham,” a cover of Rodney Crowell’s “I Ain’t Living Long Like This.” The patchwork assortment is reflective, too: Before performing “Love Hurts,” Harris describes the song as “a beginning of sorts” for her own life in music. All the songs are reimagined through the lens of four gifted musicians in compelling sync with each other — in her words, “Spyboy-ing up.”
“There's older songs that were favorites of mine, that people might be familiar with, that take on a fresh coat of paint,” Harris explains to the Scene. “But they're all washed in the blood of that band.”
“There was a real freedom in the music,” says Miller. “Sometimes the structure of the song would go out the window.”
“Deeper Well,” in particular, was different every night. Harris and Lanois built on the original version by the late, great David Olney, and on the Spyboy tour, it grew into wild new shapes. “I always just sort of let the boys go wherever they wanted to go rhythmically and instrumentally,” Harris says, “and I just would figure out where it was time for me to step up and sing the lyrics.”
The documentary’s recording lingers on Miller and Blade, whose guitar and drums lead a frenzied churn until Harris comes back in. “Emmy is the kind of bandleader that would encourage the band to go where the music takes you,” says Miller.
“You learn if you're playing in a band, you get the record, learn the record, play it like that,” he adds later. “But that was not what it was with Spyboy. It was, ‘Respect the song, but let's go see what we got. …’ Playing and playing and playing, and then, here comes that voice.”
Harris has a fondness for religious metaphors. In Ken Burns’ Country Music documentary series, she described herself as a “country music convert” from the Greenwich Village folk scene, roots that show in her anti-authority streak and her penchant for Bob Dylan covers. Speaking of Bonaparte’s Retreat, which finds homes for dogs with special support needs after their allotted shelter time has passed, she declares herself “a member of the Church of Dog.” “I just hope people realize that [dogs are] part of our community,” she says, “and we need to take care of them too.”
Her spiritual seeking shines on the Spyboy versions of Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand” and her own “Prayer in Open D,” which appear respectively on Wrecking Ball and her 1993 album A Cowgirl’s Prayer. While she calls Dylan’s more “ecclesiastical,” there’s a conversation at play between these two songs that’s illuminated through their proximity on the live album — they share a yearning devotion, and both are potent reflections on redemption and despair. For Harris’ interpretation, Lanois suggested changing the time signature on “Every Grain of Sand” to 6/8, giving it a gentle sway. “Prayer in Open D,” meanwhile, is a heartwrenching solo. When she performs it in the film, the rest of the room is frozen in rapt silence, while Harris’ own eyes are shining.
There is a miraculous sort of magic about Spyboy — a sense of kismet that might be attributable to the fact that the album was never actually intended for release. Miller recorded the band’s shows just to preserve them, intending on creating a private archive. “I just loved the band so much that I wanted proof that I was in it,” he says. He used a then-new multi-track audio recording technology that used VHS tapes because the other option for live recording wouldn’t fit on the tour bus. Somewhere along the way, says Harris, her then-manager found out, and set up a release of the recordings.
And what a blessing that he did. In her original Spyboy liner notes, Harris described the album as “the next best thing” for those who didn’t see the band live; the new reissue, she says, is “the next next best thing.”
“You do an album, and it’s static,” she explains. “It’s there, and it’s great, but there it is. But Spyboy was a living, breathing thing.”
