“May This Be Love” feels like a candle held up to a waterfall—tender light against rushing life, and a wish that gentleness might finally win
Emmylou Harris didn’t choose “May This Be Love” to show range. She chose it to tell the truth in a quieter language—one made of breath, space, and afterglow. Her recording appears on Wrecking Ball (released September 26, 1995), a record that arrived like a late-season storm: not flashy, not eager to please, but impossible to ignore once it settled over you. On that album, “May This Be Love” sits as track 9 (running 4:45), placed after the hard-won ache of the earlier songs—almost as if the record needed a moment of pure, unguarded wishing before it could move on.
If you want the clean “chart position at release,” it’s the album’s story that provides it. Upon release, Wrecking Ball peaked at No. 94 on the Billboard 200 and spent seven weeks there—modest numbers for something that would later be treated as a landmark. In the UK, the album reached No. 61 on the Official Charts. But the deeper ranking—the one that lasts—came later: Wrecking Ball won the 1996 GRAMMY Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album, and in 2025 it was announced for induction into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame. Those are the kinds of honors that don’t happen because a record sold fast; they happen because a record stayed necessary.
The song itself carries a remarkable lineage. “May This Be Love” was written by Jimi Hendrix, first released by The Jimi Hendrix Experience on Are You Experienced in 1967—often remembered as one of his gentlest, most lyrical moments. In Hendrix’s original, love is a “waterfall,” a soft place where “nothing can go wrong.” It’s romantic, yes, but also spiritual—like he’s imagining tenderness as an element, a climate you can step into and finally stop bracing against the world.
What Emmylou Harris and producer Daniel Lanois do with that vision is something rarer than a “cover.” They translate it. On Wrecking Ball, Lanois builds a sound that feels like night air—echoing, atmospheric, slightly haunted—then lets Harris drift through it with that unmistakable clarity in her voice. The performance is not loud, but it’s intense in a different way: it’s intimate. There’s a sense that the song isn’t being sung at you; it’s being sung near you, the way someone might speak softly in a room where grief has been living for a while.
Part of the song’s “behind-the-scenes” fascination is the company it keeps. Wrecking Ball is filled with writers and spirits who carry their own gravity—Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch—and it folds Hendrix into that circle as if he always belonged there. That’s not accidental. The album is, in many ways, about endurance: the way a life continues after loss, the way faith becomes a quiet habit rather than a loud claim. In that context, “May This Be Love” stops being a psychedelic love song and becomes a kind of benediction: may this—this tenderness, this calm, this rare untroubled moment—be real.
Listen to how the lyric functions in Harris’s hands. “My sweet waterfall… nothing can go wrong.” In a younger voice, those lines can sound like belief. In Harris’s voice, they sound like hope—something more fragile, and therefore more moving. Hope implies you’ve seen enough to know that things do go wrong. And you’re wishing anyway. That’s the song’s emotional meaning here: not naïveté, but courage—the courage to imagine softness in a world that often rewards hardness.
By the time “May This Be Love” arrives on Wrecking Ball, you’ve already traveled through songs that feel weathered by experience. So when this one opens its hands and offers peace, it doesn’t feel like escapism. It feels like relief. Like a rare morning where the mind is quiet, and the heart—still bruised, still loyal—tries one more time to believe in gentleness.
That’s why Emmylou Harris’s “May This Be Love” lingers. It isn’t trying to outshine Hendrix. It’s trying to keep his tender wish alive—long enough for the rest of us to step under that waterfall for a moment, and remember what calm used to feel like.