“May This Be Love” is one of those rare Emmylou Harris performances that makes you wonder whether a song had been waiting all along for this exact voice — softer, sadder, and somehow even more beautiful in the shadows than anyone first imagined.
There are songs that arrive already famous, and then there are songs that seem to find their fullest emotional shape only years later, in another artist’s hands. “May This Be Love” belongs to that second category. Written by Jimi Hendrix and first released by The Jimi Hendrix Experience on Are You Experienced in 1967, it was already a beautiful song — dreamy, liquid, inward, often known by the alternate nickname “Waterfall.” But when Emmylou Harris recorded it for Wrecking Ball in 1995, she did something extraordinary: she did not simply cover it, and she did not try to out-Hendrix Hendrix. She revealed just how naturally the song could live inside stillness, ache, and atmosphere. The result is one of those hidden Harris gems that makes a listener stop and ask, with some wonder, whether “May This Be Love” was always meant to feel this beautiful.
The first important detail is that Emmylou’s version was not a standalone single. It appears as track 9 on Wrecking Ball, released on September 26, 1995, and it had no separate chart peak of its own. That matters, because the song’s reputation comes not from radio saturation but from placement, mood, and discovery. Wrecking Ball itself was a turning point: Harris’s eighteenth studio album, produced by Daniel Lanois, and widely recognized as one of the boldest reinventions of her career. The album moved away from the more overtly traditional acoustic country textures associated with much of her earlier work and into a spacious, atmospheric world of echo, drift, and emotional weather. It later won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Recording, and in 2025 the Recording Academy also recognized the album with Grammy Hall of Fame honors. Inside that sound world, “May This Be Love” fits so naturally that it almost feels as though it had been traveling toward this destination for decades.
That is one reason the performance is so affecting: Emmylou Harris does not treat the song like a rock relic to be respectfully dusted off. She treats it like a dream one hardly wants to wake from. Hendrix’s original already showed his gift for tenderness; even reference histories of Are You Experienced single out “May This Be Love” among the album’s softer, more thoughtful ballads. But Harris changes the emotional temperature. In her hands, the song loses any remaining sense of being an interlude in a psychedelic rock canon and becomes something more hauntingly self-contained — not decorative, not “pretty” in a shallow sense, but hushed, intimate, and quietly bruised. She makes the song sound like memory reflected in water.
A great deal of that comes down to the Wrecking Ball production frame. The album credits show Daniel Lanois playing electric guitar on “May This Be Love,” and another discography source for the album notes Larry Mullen Jr. on drums for the track. Those details matter because this is not a conventional country rearrangement. It is a carefully suspended soundscape — part roots music, part dream, part nocturnal meditation. The album as a whole has long been described as atmospheric, and one period review specifically singled out the sequence of “Sweet Old World” followed by “May This Be Love” as one of the emotional peaks of the record. So when Harris sings Hendrix here, she is not borrowing prestige from a famous songwriter. She is placing his lyric in a sonic world that exposes how vulnerable the song really is.
And then there is that voice. By 1995, Emmylou Harris had long since proved she could sing sorrow, devotion, country tradition, spiritual weariness, and haunted American space better than almost anyone. On “May This Be Love,” she uses none of that power to dominate the song. Instead, she seems to step back from it just enough to let it bloom. That restraint is exactly what makes the performance feel so beautiful. She sings as though the song’s fragility is the point. There is no need to explain the emotion, and no need to dramatize it. She trusts the melody, the image, and the feeling already inside the writing. That was always one of her greatest gifts as an interpreter: she could take a song and reveal not just what it said, but what it had been quietly carrying.
The beauty of her version is also tied to its place in the larger Wrecking Ball project. This is an album built from songs by Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch, and Jimi Hendrix — yet despite that formidable company, “May This Be Love” never feels like a clever surprise pick. It feels necessary. One later critical reassessment of the album specifically called out “May This Be Love” among its standout tracks, which makes sense: it is one of the clearest examples of what made the album so important. Harris and Lanois were not simply curating good songs. They were finding hidden spiritual kinships between them. Hendrix, in this setting, stops sounding like genre contrast and starts sounding like part of the same haunted family.
So yes, this hidden Emmylou Harris gem really does make you ask whether “May This Be Love” was always meant to feel this beautiful. The honest answer is that Hendrix wrote a song beautiful enough to survive transformation — but Emmylou Harris found a different center of gravity inside it. She made it slower in the heart, deeper in the shadows, and more quietly devastating than many listeners ever expected. That is why the song lingers. Not as a novelty cover, not as a clever left turn, but as one of those rare performances that seem to uncover a truth the song had been holding back until exactly the right singer arrived.
