‘The Connection’: the Emmylou Harris track that took over a year to write
As a pioneer of folk rock and Americana, Emmylou Harris is more than used to trying something a little different. However, much of the challenge actually revolved around having anything to show for the fruits of her labour, as one of her songs took over a year to write.
In fairness to Harris, the blame for this tedious trial does not fall to her, but instead to the songwriting duo of Randy Sharp and Jack Routh, who decided to make their lives frankly way too difficult back in the early 2000s, by penning a song called ‘The Connection’. Of course, it sounds simple in principle – what’s so complex about a romantic ode of lovers torn thousands of miles apart? – but in order for the song to reach hearts, they didn’t want to make things that straightforward.
Imagine a lonely man in a hotel room, with a single thread that runs from his heart, out of the room, and all the way across the country to the location of the woman of his dreams – then try to bottle the vastness of that journey into one song. That was the issue that Sharp and Routh faced, and it was far from an easy one. “It’s all about that thread, that connection that he’s imagining in his missing her, and in his refusal to let go of her. He’s describing what’s left of the connection,” Sharp explained.
But due to its warbling words, unusual structure, and sheer scale, ‘The Connection’ was something that was, in many ways, just too difficult to condense. That’s the reason that it took the pair of writers over the space of a year to get the song into a condition they were happy with, and a further 13 years after it was originally recorded for Harris to lend her voice to it.
For obvious reasons, this was an arduous process, but it was one that the country singer was aware of from the get-go and keen to have her imprint on, hence her sticking with the trust of Sharp and Routh for such an extended period.
“We’d known Emmylou a long time and had taken this song to her very early on, and she always liked it,” they said. “But it just never fit her records. But it’s a real interesting song. And it’s a real linear story. You kind of need to hear it. It’s peculiar, but peculiar, I think, in all the right ways.”
The magnum opus of a tune, in all its “peculiar”, winding, and warbling ways, evidently wormed its way into Harris’s heart, and she let it shine when the time was right, namely on her 2005 compilation album The Very Best of Emmylou Harris: Heartaches & Highways, including ‘The Connection’ as its closing track.
It may have taken the best part of a decade and a half to get there, but the romantic ideals in Sharp and Routh’s minds had finally made their way onto a track that would be heard by the country legions all over the world.
In many ways, it’s a lesson on never giving up and ploughing forwards with your projects, even when they seem impossible. Sure, it might not always take nearly 15 years and a country superstar to come to your rescue, but there’s always a way of getting things over the line. Sharp and Routh learned the length of that process more than most.
