Kingsway Studios sits on Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans, a converted nineteenth-century mansion with high ceilings and a slow ceiling fan and the wet heat of the river in the walls. In the spring of 1995, Emmylou Harris walked in carrying two decades of credibility she had begun to feel like a weight. Daniel Lanois put on a slow, reverberant version of Neil Young's "Wrecking Ball" he had been pacing around with for weeks. She listened. She told him she wanted to make a whole record that sounded like that.
She had been a country singer who folded folk into the bones of her records since Gram Parsons died and she carried on. Her catalog was full of grace. What she felt, sitting on her porch in Nashville before the call to Lanois, was that her own voice was beginning to sound like a friend's voice — recognizable, dependable, and slightly removed from her. She had been protecting something. Lanois had heard it in a single bar of one of her records and would not stop hearing it.
The producer's job, in the version of it that matters, is not to amplify what the artist already shows. It is to recognize what the artist has been keeping just under the surface and to ask, gently and persistently, to let it in. Lanois surrounded her with strangers — Brian Blade and Daryl Johnson and Larry Mullen, washes of guitar that did not behave like country guitars, his own production breathing the room into the takes. He handed her songs she would not have chosen. Steve Earle's "Goodbye," written from inside his own addiction. Lucinda Williams' "Sweet Old World," written for a friend who had killed himself. Jimi Hendrix's "May This Be Love" pulled into a dirge. Anna McGarrigle's "Goin' Back to Harlan." Emmylou walked into the vocal booth and sang the songs she would not have chosen on a record she would not have made and discovered the singer she had been hiding from her own ear.
Trust is the wrong word for what is happening in that room. Trust suggests deference, and deference is not what makes a great record. The real work is closer to negotiation — the artist surrendering her plan, the producer surrendering his, both of them surrendering until what neither could have predicted begins to arrive. Lanois and Emmylou disagreed about the mix more than once. She kept the songs she most needed. He kept the textures he most needed. Neither of them got the record they had walked in to make. They got the record the record wanted.
The history of producers and artists who found each other is the history of people who refused to listen to the obvious version of one another. Lanois did it with Dylan on Oh Mercy in this same city six years earlier. Rubin did it with Cash in a small living room near the end. T-Bone Burnett did it with Krauss and Plant in a way nobody had thought to. The producer is not the auteur and not the technician. The producer is the listener who hears what the artist is quietly carrying and waits for permission to bring it forward.
When Wrecking Ball came out that September, it surprised the people who thought they knew her, which was the point. What Lanois heard was not a new Emmylou. It was the Emmylou she had been keeping off the record. The producer's gift, when he has one, is recognizing the thing the artist has not yet agreed to let anyone else hear.