Throwback Thursday: Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton & Emmylou Harris, ‘After the Gold Rush’

Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly series showcasing an album, single, music video or performance of a bygone era and its personal and/or cultural significance.

My eyes were transfixed on the screen. I had never heard such a nearly-supernatural collection of voices. Linda Ronstadt‘s gaze was utterly piercing, as if she were singing only to me. Our super-power giant television set was the focal point of my upbringing, turning to CMT or MTV to get my fix. I knew then, no older than eight or nine, that by immersing myself in that fantastical world, I could make sense of my own. Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, a pair of god-like sirens who beckoned me further into their sphere, joined Ronstadt on “After the Gold Rush,” a magical piano ballad embedded in the trio’s 1999 collaborative record, Trio II. A version featuring Valerie Carter (replacing Parton) can be found on Ronstadt’s 1995 solo set, Feels Like Home.

The song is a Neil Young original (off his 1970 album of the same name), written about a dream-like trance the narrator undergoes ⎯⎯ hooking the past, present and future in the sun’s blistered touch. Drenched in metaphors about “knights in armor coming, saying something about a queen” and “peasants singing and drummers drumming,” the song’s backstory is unknown. Even Young doesn’t know what the hell it’s about; he owes that in large part to whatever hallucinatory drug he was taking at the time of writing. Parton allegedly stated once, “When we were doing the ‘Trio’ album, I asked Linda and Emmy what it meant, and they didn’t know. So, we called Neil, and he didn’t know. We asked him, flat out, what it meant, and he said, ‘Hell, I don’t know. I just wrote it. It just depends on what I was taking at the time. I guess every verse has something different I’d taken.'”

The second verse skips to the present, as the narrator recollects during a spell of night sweats, “I was lying in a burned out basement with the full moon in my eyes / I was hoping for replacement when the sun burst thru the sky,” Harris, Parton and Ronstadt mingle harmoniously together over cathedral-sized organ. The accompanying visual is intercut with images of a young girl clutching a balloon and seeking out some sort of answer under Mother Nature’s discerning eye. By the third verse, reality is no longer a tangible concept. “Well, I dreamed I saw the silver space ships flying in the yellow haze of the sun / There were children crying and colors flying all around the chosen ones,” Parton sings, the ethereal quality of her voice a rather spooky contribution. Later, she chronicles an unexpected space trip, “The loading had begun / Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun…”

Whatever the song is actually about, the vocal performance is magnificent.

Watch below:

Photo courtesy: Webster Public Relations

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