Bluegrass star Krauss enters vintage country
>> Alison Krauss could let the fact that she was answering the door of her Nashville home at 8am with her hair styled and make-up done imply that she’d risen early and knocked out her beauty regimen. But as this celebrated singer and fiddle-playing bandleader — the closest thing to a pop star that the contemporary bluegrass scene has produced — led the way into the den, she couldn’t resist making a confession — “I haven’t even washed my face!”
Krauss’s loose, flaxen waves and smoky eye shadow were, in fact, left over from a Randy Travis tribute show at Bridgestone Arena the night before. To be a good citizen of the Nashville music community requires consistently showing up to pay homage to its luminaries, and to tradition itself, at such ceremonial affairs, but Krauss, 45, is an especially coveted presence: She can be counted on to interpret other artists’ repertoires with reverential grace.
Krauss is three decades into her recording career, which is often the time when performers who have passed through the country spotlight feel the need to rub away commercial gloss and reinvent themselves as models of grounded artistry by adopting approaches that seem older, sturdier, unsullied by fleeting trends. But Krauss has been a symbol of rooted finesse all along. What is there for an acknowledged old soul to do on the first album of her 40s? On Windy City, which debuted on Friday, Krauss ventures into territory she has never explored — lushly orchestrated classic-country covers — with a breezy, modern self-awareness that sets her nostalgic gestures apart.
Arriving six years after her previous release, PaperAeroplane (2011), nearly a decade on from her hugely successful partnership with Robert Plant, Raising Sand (2007), and 17 years beyond her last solo outing, Forget About It (1999), the new album represents her Capitol Records debut after a long relationship with Rounder Records. Krauss got her professional start in her mid-teens, which isn’t unheard-of in a bluegrass world that nurtures its prodigies, and since than has alternated between solo albums and band projects with Union Station, an immaculate luxury model of a string band featuring the dobro player Jerry Douglas, the singer/guitarist Dan Tyminski, the banjo/guitar player Ron Block and the bassist Barry Bales, and occasional detours like the one with Plant, which picked up five Grammys.
Krauss is a connoisseur of songs, not a songwriter, and her enchantment with the compositions she has culled ordinarily sets the tone of her self-produced albums. This time, though, she chose to pursue a partnership that could yield a particular vibe. She lent her voice to a wistful duet version of Make the World Go Away (1965) on Jamey Johnson’s 2012 collection of classic Hank Cochran country songs, and the elegant shuffle echoed easeful studio performances of the Nashville Sound era. She zeroed in on the project’s seasoned producer, Buddy Cannon, who had a low-key way of drawing her out at the microphone.
“When I sang for him,” she said, “I noticed that there was such a desire to perform for him, and that doesn’t always come so much. Usually you’re kind of searching your own navel all the time for your inspiration.”
When Krauss and began sifting through potential songs on his office computer, she stipulated that they steer clear of go-to country standards. “I’m just one big B-side,” she quipped, referring to songs that take a back seat to the more popular tracks on records.
Drawing heavily from the 1950s and 1960s catalogues of country and bluegrass stylists such as Willie Nelson, Mac Wiseman, Brenda Lee, Glen Campbell and Eddy Arnold, Krauss and Cannon rounded out their selections with a couple of songs that were actually from her lifetime, one of which, Dream of Me (1981), she recalled hearing at a bluegrass festival in her youth but didn’t realise that Cannon had written.
In language and chord structure, the vintage selections seem simple next to the bulk of Krauss’s repertoire.
“There’s a certain feeling, a mystery about songs that are older than you, and I love that,” Krauss said. The sentiment isn’t confined to music: Her two-storey house, built in 1918, is full of antiques.
As a young singer, Krauss tended to use the full force of her rarefied instrument, but by the time she scored a mid-1990s country breakthrough with When You Say Nothing at All (1995), she was artfully recalibrating her approach, softening her attack, applying beguiling, breathy shading.
Along the way Krauss came to embody a particular feminine vocal archetype. “There’s something about how clear her tone is and how much control she has and restraint she uses,” said the country-pop singer Cam. “She can sing bluegrass, Americana, country, across all those genres, and she can reach so many people that don’t even listen to those genres normally.”
Contradictions are at the heart of Krauss’s sensibilities: the juxtaposition of the exquisiteness of her singing and the brawniness of the male vocal partners she chooses (in this case, Johnson, Hank Williams Jr and others); contrasts between notions of naturalness and refinement; the tension between mastering a well-mapped musical lineage and embracing a broadminded, pop-attuned versatility.
On the new album, her reading of River in the Rain, from Roger Miller’s Huckleberry Finn-inspired musical Big River (1985), conveys melancholy admiration of forceful, unfettered freedom. She accentuates the inner dialogue of You Don’t Know Me (1956), her singing burdened with quiet resignation to keep hidden romantic desires hidden. Hinting at feelings just beneath the surface is a Krauss speciality, and such “one-sided conversations” are her “favourite subject.”
“A lot of times, women, their strength has been judged by their ability to hide emotion,” she mused.