Emmylou Harris did not simply cover “May This Be Love” on Wrecking Ball; she uncovered the wounded tenderness hidden inside Jimi Hendrix’s dream and gave it a second, haunting life.
There are cover songs that admire the original, and then there are cover songs that somehow slip inside it and change the way we hear it forever. Emmylou Harris’s 1995 recording of “May This Be Love” belongs in the second category. Released on her landmark album Wrecking Ball, this was not a casual nod to Jimi Hendrix, nor a novelty choice designed to surprise listeners. It was a deep act of reinterpretation. Harris and producer Daniel Lanois took one of Hendrix’s most delicate, dreamlike compositions and transformed it into something quieter, older, more weathered, and in some ways even more intimate.
One important fact deserves to be placed near the top: “May This Be Love” was never a major chart single in either its original Hendrix form or Harris’s 1995 version. Hendrix’s recording appeared on Are You Experienced in 1967, the groundbreaking debut album that reached No. 2 on the UK Albums Chart and No. 5 on the US Billboard 200. Harris’s version arrived almost three decades later as part of Wrecking Ball, an album whose influence was measured less by radio rankings than by its artistic afterglow. That album would go on to win the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album, and it remains one of the defining records of Harris’s later career.
That matters, because Wrecking Ball was a turning point. By 1995, Emmylou Harris was already deeply respected for her work in country, folk, and roots music, but this album widened the horizon. Under Daniel Lanois, she stepped into a sound world filled with echo, atmosphere, shadows, and space. The record did not abandon the heart of American roots music, but it did refuse to stay neatly inside old boundaries. In that setting, choosing a Jimi Hendrix song made perfect sense. Not the explosive Hendrix of guitar mythology, but the lyrical, floating, inward Hendrix of “May This Be Love”, sometimes remembered by fans as “Waterfall.”
And that is the real beauty of Harris’s version: she does not chase Hendrix’s style. She does not imitate his phrasing, his guitar vocabulary, or the psychedelic softness of the 1967 recording. Instead, she asks a more interesting question: what is this song really feeling underneath the surface? In Hendrix’s hands, “May This Be Love” is tender and dreamy, almost like a private shelter built out of romance and nature imagery. The waterfall in the lyric feels like refuge, enchantment, and escape. In Emmylou Harris’s reading, that same refuge feels more fragile. It sounds less like the beginning of love and more like the memory of love trying to remain sacred in a harder world.
That difference is what makes reinterpretation so powerful. Harris sings with extraordinary restraint here. She never oversells the emotion. Her voice on Wrecking Ball often seems to hover rather than arrive, and on “May This Be Love” that quality is devastatingly effective. The song no longer feels like a young man’s reverie. It becomes a meditation, almost a whispered prayer. The arrangement around her is spare but atmospheric, with Lanois creating a landscape that feels suspended between dusk and dawn. Nothing rushes. Nothing demands attention. The song simply gathers emotional weight as it moves.
That is also why this performance fits so naturally within the larger spirit of Wrecking Ball. The album is full of songs about endurance, change, spiritual hunger, and the ache that lingers after certainty disappears. Harris was not merely selecting strong compositions; she was choosing songs that could survive being lived in. “May This Be Love” survives that beautifully. If Hendrix’s version glows with softness, Harris’s version glows with experience. It is not less romantic. It is more complexly romantic. It understands that tenderness can coexist with distance, and that comfort is often most moving when it arrives through sadness rather than innocence.
There is also something quietly courageous about the choice itself. Covering Jimi Hendrix is always risky, because so much of his legend is tied to the force of personality and sound. But Harris avoided the obvious trap by not competing with the legend. She listened for the song beneath the icon. That is why her recording still feels so fresh. It reminds us that great songwriting can travel across genre, era, and temperament without losing its soul. In fact, sometimes it gains one more layer when handed to another voice.
For listeners who came to Wrecking Ball expecting only a roots record, “May This Be Love” must have felt like a beautiful surprise. For those who knew Hendrix well, it offered a different revelation: beneath all the mythology, he had written a song tender enough to be reborn in a whisper. And for Emmylou Harris, it became one more piece of evidence that her greatest gift was never just singing beautifully. It was hearing where a song could still go.
That is why this 1995 recording endures. It does not ask us to choose between Emmylou Harris and Jimi Hendrix, between country and rock, between tradition and experiment. It simply shows what happens when an artist of great sensitivity walks into a familiar song, lowers the lights, and reveals the part that had been waiting in the shadows all along.
