Making Believe

The pedal steel guitar introduction on this recording tells you everything you need to know about where you are: somewhere between heartbreak and resignation, in a country music tradition that understood longing as a condition rather than a phase. Harris covers this classic (originally recorded by Kitty Wells in 1954) with a voice that sounds genuinely inhabited by the emotion rather than performing it. The song is about the particular self-deception of someone who continues to behave as if a relationship is intact after it has ended — meeting someone out of habit, speaking as if nothing has changed, pretending against all evidence that the ordinary gestures of love still mean what they once did. Harris's soprano has a quality of clarity that gives the lyric an almost painful transparency; she can't help sounding like she understands exactly what she's singing about. The arrangement is traditional without being stiff, the rhythm section understated, the acoustic guitar providing a steady heartbeat beneath the more emotional coloring of the steel. What the song captures so precisely is the way people delay grief through pretending — not out of dishonesty but because the truth hasn't fully arrived yet. Culturally, Harris's recording helped introduce classic honky-tonk material to a 1970s audience that was ready to rediscover what country music had always known about endurance and love. This is a song for sitting still with something you're not quite ready to let go of.