Yet right now Harris is making arguably the most daring music of her thirty-year career. With Spyboy, a fourteen-track live album named after her band, Harris reinvents a good part of her neotraditionalist past and brings a spiritual glow to everything she touches; she sounds more like a Celtic mystic chasing her muse than a Nashville queen running down her near-hits.

The mood is set by her trio, which includes Buddy Miller, whose reverberating cloudburst guitar makes him Nashville's answer to the Edge. On Rodney Crowell's outlaw anthem "Ain't Living Long," Miller and bassist Daryl Johnson play intertwining melody lines that fly like zigzagging circus acrobats. Then it's drummer Brady Blade's turn to loosen "Deeper Well" from its moorings with polyrhythmic volleys. On Daniel Lanois' "The Maker," Afro-Cuban percussion underpins gospel-soul harmonies.

Perhaps the reason Harris lets her band stretch is that her sweet soprano isn't what it used to be. She no longer impales high notes; now her voice shivers as she pursues them. But on an a cappella "Calling My Children Home" and the sanctified "All My Tears," she projects a powerful, heartbreaking fragility. When she reprises her 1975 classic "Boulder to Birmingham," she turns it into a hymn to her searching: "I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham if I thought I could see your face." As Spyboy demonstrates, the journey is still a long way from over.