Emmylou Harris Quotes
Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it's a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.
"[I'm] an excellent ex-wife [with] a wonderful relationship with my two husbands. Paul [Kennerly] and Brian [Brian Ahern] are probably my two best friends".
[The next two years were] a very black period". [Her daughter, Hallie, was being looked after most of the time by her parents.] "I didn't have any money. I had a sense of terrible loss. But what I also had was a fire in my belly. I wasn't going to go back to waiting table. I felt I had to be better at fronting a band.
When Gram Parsons died: "I didn't have any chance to grieve in the traditional way. First, 'Phil Kaufman' (Parsons's roadie) intercepted the air ambulance transporting the body, drove the coffin out into the desert, doused it in kerosene and burnt it, in accordance, he said, with a verbal instruction from Parsons. Next, I was told I would not be welcome at the memorial service in New Orleans. Gram's wife was deeply suspicious of me. She'd already vetoed his plan to put my name and image next to his on the cover of Grievous Angel. Now she was barring me from the church. I was left running away from my grief. I just got in my little car and drove all over America for months, looking for people who knew Gram who could comfort me, looking for any piece of that time I could hold onto."
On joining Gram Parsons in Los Angeles in 1972: "It was a totally new world. I was a person who never had fun in high school because I was too busy being a grade-A student, and here was with people who really knew how to enjoy themselves. I was very much the country mouse, trying to be professional, always turning up on time, ready to work, while Gram seemed very untogether. This was a man who really had a vision; the problem was, he was drinking heavily. I didn't think the record would ever get made."
On studying acting on a university drama scholarship: "When I was singing, it felt so real. Whereas when I was acting, I was just acting."
On growing up an Air Force brat: "We weren't part of a real community. There were people from all over, which meant there was no culture."
On the male-dominated 1970s music industry's attitude toward women: "ladies were regarded as a liability: the view was, they get pregnant and they freak out on the road, they're unreliable and they don't sell."
