Collaboration has been central to music since the beginning of time. Most of our posts about collaboration intend to point out more unusual, but much needed, forms of collaboration related to communities and their surrounding ecosystems. Something about this album captures our intent with this word better than most news items usually do.  Credit for our finding our way to this musical collaboration goes to the interview the duet gave some time back:

Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell were featured on today’s episode of NPR’s Fresh Air. The two spoke with host Terry Gross about their long friendship and their new album, Old Yellow Moon, a new 12-track duets album featuring song by Crowell and others that marks the first official collaboration from the duo since Crowell joined Harris’ Hot Band as guitarist and harmony singer in 1975. The two also discuss a few of their musical

influences and their shared love of harmony singing. Terry Gross also takes some time to talk with Harris about her early life and career in music.

“Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell are such good solo singers,” says Gross, “it’s wonderful to hear them together, duetting on the new album Old Yellow Moon.”

Listen to the episode at npr.org/freshair.

Harris and Crowell are bringing the songs of Old Yellow Moon on their current tour of North America with Richard Thompson and his Electric Trio. Following Wednesday night’s barnstormer at the Beacon Theatre in New York City on Wednesday night, the musicians head south, making stops at the Strathmore in Maryland and Durham Performing Arts Center in North Carolina this weekend, followed by shows in Charlotte, Savannah, Atlanta, and Knoxville next week. Harris and Crowell take the show to the UK in May. For additional tour details and ticket links, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.

“Ms. Harris and Mr. Crowell reminisced, harmonized, sketched their kind of country canon and extended it to reflect on the present,” writes New York Times music critic Jon Pareles of Wednesday’s show at the Beacon. “Ms. Harris’s latter-day voice has traded some sweetness for grain, but she and Mr. Crowell reclaimed the close harmonies they had in the 1970s, and their band was impeccable—particularly Steve Fishell on pedal steel guitar and dobro and Jedd Hughes on lead guitar, who could set a cozy atmosphere for ballads or streak and skid through hot country licks.” Read the concert review at nytimes.com.

CMT, in its review of Wednesday’s show, concludes: “It may have taken almost four decades for Harris and Crowell’s stories to end up truly intertwined again, but the years of musical riches they revisited in the course of a single concert showed that all the waiting was worthwhile.” Read that review at cmt.com.