Though she wasn’t in a full-on flop mode, Harris sensed that she needed to recalibrate.
Harris’ 1993 album, Cowgirl’s Prayer, kept pace with trends with a couple of rock-tinged numbers and crystal-clear production, but it had no Top 40 singles, and peaked at No. But, by the mid-1990s, Harris was starting to hit dead ends with country radio, a platform that has a particularly ferocious hold over the genre’s metrics for success. Outside of her many guest appearances, Harris kept up a steady career of her own, issuing sublime folk-leaning records in the ’70s and chasing them with more squarely country material over the next decade. Hear her with Bob Dylan and Neil Young, with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt with Mark Knopfler, George Jones, Willie Nelson, or even in the low harmony of the riverbed siren song on screen in O Brother, Where Art Thou? That’s her, joining the Band for “ Evangeline” in The Last Waltz, and bouncing with Bonnie Raitt and Little Feat on The Midnight Special. With her light, flexible voice, Harris is one of the definitive team players of American music-she’s everywhere, if you know where to look. For Harris, Wrecking Ball became a place to be a version of herself that she’d never put to tape before.
To some listeners, it was a betrayal by their reedy Queen of the Silver Dollar, who’d once happily offered heaps of twangy, mild-mannered songs for others, it was a refreshing start to a new chapter, proof that a woman’s artistry had no expiration date. The record drew Harris away from the gaudier side of Nashville and the cynical side of adulthood, pulling inspiration from the life Harris had lived with contributions from a handful of those she’d met along the way.
Released in late September of 1995, Wrecking Ball is a staggering work that defied expectations for what a middle-aged woman should be doing with her time. But for all her high esteem, Harris was in need of a new challenge-and so, here came Wrecking Ball.
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