Trio II is the second album featuring collaboration between singers Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, and Dolly Parton. A dozen years after the release of their original Trio album, the country music supergroup returned with another in the same vein. Listening to this album, buyers might have encountered a sense of déjà vu, since five of the ten tracks on this album first appeared, without Dolly Parton, on Linda Ronstadt's 1995 album, Feels Like Home. These five tracks were "Lover's Return," "High Sierra," a cover of Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush," "The Blue Train," and the title song to the Ronstadt album, the Randy Newman-composed "Feels Like Home." The album peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard country albums chart. The songs were actually recorded in 1994 by Parton, Ronstadt and Harris, but label disputes and conflicting schedules of the three women prevented its release at the time. Eventually, Ronstadt remixed the five above-mentioned tracks (sans Parton's vocals) to include in Feels Like Home. In 1999 (after Parton and Harris had parted ways with their respective labels), they decided to finally release the album as originally recorded. Though it yielded no hit singles (mainstream U.S. country radio had long since dropped nearly all artists approaching or over 50 from their playlists by the late 1990s), Trio 2 was certified Gold by the RIAA on November 15, 2001 and won the Trio a Grammy Award. Childhood photos of Harris, Parton and Ronstadt were used for the album's cover, when a photo shoot proved impossible (due to the three artists' busy schedules), though they did manage to assemble for a short promotional tour in early 1999, and to film a video for "After the Gold Rush". "Softly and Tenderly" was recorded for the album but cut. It was included on the 2007 Emmylou Harris boxset, Songbird: Rare Tracks and Forgotten Gems.
