At a point when many artists would be content to rest on past laurels, Emmylou Harris continues to be a cutting edge musician whose talents are in full bloom. Her latest album, “All I Intended To Be,” is a case in point. Split evenly between original material and affecting covers of overlooked gems, the album gives full voice to Harris’s range of talents. The veteran singer-songwriter will appear at Atlanta’s Chastain Park Amphitheatre this Friday.

Russell Hall: Do you think of your albums as concept albums, as opposed to simply being collections of songs?

Emmylou Harris: I do, in the sense that you get a few songs that come your way at a particular time. If you want to record them, then you look for a thread that, in some way, helps you find the other songs. That might sound a little airy, but it’s worked for me. It creates a sort of magnetic field, which brings in additional material.

RH: What’s the first thing that draws you to a song, and makes you want to cover it?

EH: I’m sure it’s the lyric. I think the words come first for me, because they tend to evoke an emotion in me more so than the melody does. I don’t mean to say that the melody is secondary, but I do think I’m lyric driven. But what it is about the lyric, I couldn’t possibly tell you. I wish I knew. It just has to ring true in some way, and it has to reveal something to me.

RH: You once said that a musician’s style is really a product of his or her limitations. Were you talking specifically about singing?

EH: Yes, I was. I wish I could take credit for that line, but that was a quote I picked up from someplace else. When I read it, I thought, “That’s absolutely right.” That’s another reason that, if you’re interpreting a song, thankfully it won’t sound exactly like somebody else. Sometimes you’re just so inspired by something somebody else has done, you try to copy that. But in trying to copy it, you end up doing something else, because you can’t copy it exactly. Sometimes you want so badly to sing a particular song, you don’t allow yourself to be stopped by the things you can’t do. And you end up with something different.

RH: You’ve been extremely active throughout your career. Have there been times in which you felt burned out?

EH: Oh, there have definitely been times when I’ve felt burned out. And usually, at those times, I didn’t take a rest, and I probably should have. I guess I’m a bit driven, for whatever reason. Either I had a band and felt we needed to tour so everybody could work, or I needed to pay the rent, or the record company needed a record. You can always find a million excuses for not slowing down. But I would always try to come up with some device to spark me. In the early ’90s, I put together a bluegrass band because I was burned out. I had a great electric band, but I was just not firing on all pistons, and I knew it. My voice was suffering, and I had bronchitis, but it was more than that. I needed to do something different.

RH: Does that desire to change also spring from restlessness, or from trying to expand the notion of what people typically think of as country music?

EH: I think it’s a matter of continually trying to keep yourself excited about what you do. That’s probably the one thing to fear — that you’ll dry up creatively. But if you do, you should have the courage to hang up your shoes, at least for a while. I think that would be difficult for me, and I admit that. Music has always been such a huge part of my life. Sometimes you do get overloaded, and you start to think you’ll never enjoy music again. But then along comes someone like Patty Griffin, and you go, “My God, who is this girl!” So you just want to be excited about music, even if it’s not the act of doing it yourself.