I know of three people who know that Emmylou Harris is the greatest female singer since Ella Fitzgerald — me, a bloke in Wallington and, to my amazement, David Attenborough. “Yes, yes,” he says, in that breathy, gorilla-charming voice, “absolutely.” He even knows and loves her performance of Love Hurts with Gram Parsons. Attenborough is a national institution, of course, but cool also? Awestruck, I ask him a question I thought I’d never ask: “What’s on your iPod?”
“Every major classical work since Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 — it’s a 45-gig iPod — all Beethoven symphonies, all Mahler and, yes, yes, Emmylou Harris.”
Out in the field, as he so often is, he spends the nights in tents listening to music. Before iPods changed everything, he took CDs, always including some demanding music he had never heard — say, Janacek quartets. In the darkness, he would reach for a CD and put it on, not knowing what it was. If he couldn’t stand what he heard, he would grope for another. But he allowed himself to do this only twice. The rule was that he must listen to the third CD. “I had to sit through it, that had to be it. It was a little game.”
Read the rest of this awesome interview here.
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