Heartaches & Highways: The Very Best of Emmylou Harris

1	Love Hurts / Gram Parsons 3:40
2	Boulder to Birmingham 3:34
3	Making Believe 3:37
4	Pancho and Lefty 4:50
5	One of These Days 3:04
6	(Lost His Love) On Our Last Date Live 3:32
7	Born to Run 3:45
8	Beneath Still Waters 3:44
9	If I Could Only Win Your Love 2:36
10	Together Again 3:54
11	That Lovin' You Feelin' Again / Roy Orbison 4:10
12	To Know Him Is to Love Him / Trio 3:51
13	Two More Bottles of Wine 3:07
14	Wayfaring Stranger 3:27
15	Calling My Children Home 3:10
16	Green Pastures 3:11
17	Orphan Girl 3:16
18	Michaelangelo 5:14
19	Here I Am 3:49
20	The Connection 5:29

Barnes & Noble

To the extent that a career of nearly 40 years' duration can be summarized in 20 cuts, Heartaches & Highways offers a fine thumbnail of the depth and breadth of Emmylou Harris's artistry. The song sequence starts at the beginning, with her terse duet with Gram Parsons on the Everly Brothers' classic "Love Hurts" and winds up in the present day with a new song, the atmospheric, near-five-and-a-half-minute odyssey "Connection." Those selections bookend a tune stack that ranges from her eerie, self-penned evocation of love and longing, "Boulder to Birmingham," to heartfelt reworkings of honky-tonk classics -- "Making Believe," Kitty Wells's tear-stained depiction of abject loneliness, and "Together Again," Buck Owens's oddly restrained celebration of lovers reunited -- as well as Harris's stirring interpretations of songs by once-obscure writers such as Townes Van Zandt, whose timeless "Pancho & Lefty" was in Harris's repertoire long before Willie and Merle found it. Also featured is Harris's tender, lilting duet with Roy Orbison on an often-overlooked '70s gem (overlooked, perhaps, because it was released only on the soundtrack of an awful Meat Loaf movie titled Roadie), "That Lovin' You Feelin' Again," which was by far the best Orbison performance on record in an otherwise forgettable decade for the Big O. The Trio -- Emmylou, Dolly Parton, and Linda Ronstadt -- are also present and accounted for with their sweet reading of Phil Spector's "To Know Him Is to Love Him." More recent fare, such as "Orphan Girl" and "Michelangelo," and a certain daring in working with producer Daniel Lanois, reveal an artist still eager for new challenges, on both the literary and musical fronts. This is a good place to find out why Harris always sounds so fresh and inspired. David McGee

All Music Guide

Emmylou Harris is an artist whose body of work is so consistently strong one could almost pull 20 songs at random from her catalog, string them together, and end up with a pretty listenable disc -- which suggests that the real choices in putting together a "best of Emmylou" album has as much to do with what not to include as what should be on hand. Harris herself helped compile The Very Best of Emmylou Harris: Heartaches & Highways, and while the album certainly doesn't avoid Harris' chart successes, she seems less interested in creating a definitive hits collection than in tracing her journey from the sweet, sad-voiced girl who sang with Gram Parsons to the gifted and thoughtful artist who has lately crafted such mid-career masterpieces as Wrecking Ball and Red Dirt Girl. While the album isn't sequenced in a strictly chronological fashion, the results faithfully trace Harris' subtle but clear stylistic evolution while also offering plenty of evidence that she's perhaps the most naturally gifted song stylist to emerge in country music since the 1970s, able to swing from the honky tonk spirit of "Two More Bottles of Wine" to the rueful losers tale of "Pancho and Lefty" to the gospel passion of "Calling My Children Home" without missing a step. Her superb taste in collaborative musicians, songwriters, and duet partners is also clearly evident throughout, and while the surfaces of later tracks such as "Orphan Girl" and "Michelangelo" may have a different feel, the depth and clarity of Harris' voice and the singular beauty of her creative vision lend this material all the commonality one could need. (And the album's one new track, "The Connection," suggests there's plenty more where all this came from.) If you're looking for an introduction to Emmylou Harris' broad and remarkable body of work, The Very Best of Emmylou Harris: Heartaches & Highways is a strong starting point, and if you simply want to hear 75 minutes of superb music, this fills the bill on that score as well. Mark Deming