Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris - Our Shangri-La (live)
Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris have had long histories of collaborating with and supporting other artists. In addition to her 23 solo albums and three successful collaborative albums with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt, Harris has recorded backing and duet vocals with many of the great recording artists of her generation, including The Band, Garth Brooks, Johnny Cash, John Denver, Bob Dylan, George Jones, Lyle Lovett, Bill Monroe, Roy Orbison, Gram Parsons, Tammy Wynette, and Neil Young.
Knopfler has also been involved in a number of collaborative projects, recording duets with Chet Atkins, George Jones, Van Morrison, and James Taylor, producing albums by Willy DeVille, Bob Dylan, Bap Kennedy, and Randy Newman, and contributing guitar tracks to numerous recordings by other artists, including Clint Black, The Chieftains, Eric Clapton, Phil Everly, Waylon Jennings, B.B. King, Kris Kristofferson, Sonny Landreth, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Cliff Richard, Sting, Tina Turner, Steely Dan, and Jimmy Webb.
Both shared a love of country music and an admiration for one of country music's guitar masters, Chet Atkins. In 1990, Atkins and Knopfler recorded a collaborative album Neck and Neck, but their friendship went back even further. Knopfler and Harris first met while appearing on a Chet Atkins television special in 1987. They stayed in touch, and about ten years later in Nashville, Mark played a few of his songs for Harris, and the idea to record together emerged.
Knopfler and Harris supported the release of All the Roadrunning with the All the Roadrunning Tour of Europe and North America, which started on 26 May 2006 in Brussels, Belgium, and included 23 concerts in 23 cities, ending in Berkeley, California, on 30 June 2006.
The tour lineup included Mark Knopfler (guitar, vocals), Emmylou Harris (guitar, vocals), Guy Fletcher (keyboards), Richard Bennett (guitar), Stuart Duncan (fiddle, mandolin), Matt Rollings (keyboards), Glenn Worf (bass), and Danny Cummings (drums).
The concert on 28 June 2006 at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Los Angeles was recorded and released as a live album and DVD, Real Live Roadrunning, on 14 November 2006 by Mercury Records and Universal Music internationally, and by Warner Bros. Records in the United States.
The lyrics:
Its the end of a perfect day for all the surfer boys and girls
The suns dropping down in the bay and falling off the world
There's a diamond in the sky, our evening stone in our shangri-la
Get that fire burning strong right here and right now
Its here and then it's gone, there's no secret anyhow.
We may never love again to the music of guitars in our shangrila
Tonight your beauty burns into my memory
The wheel of heaven turns above us endlessly
This is all the heaven we got, right here where we are in our shangrila.
Tonight your beauty burns into my memory
The wheel of heaven turns above us endlessly
This is all the heaven we got, right here where we are in our shangrila.
In our shangrila
In our shangrila
