‘I couldn’t stand to hear myself sing’

Alison Krauss, the most awarded woman in Grammy history, tells Neil McCormick about the mystery condition that took her voice away

Alison Krauss has the most beautiful voice you could ever wish to hear. Soft, high and ethereal, it has earned her 27 Grammy awards over the past 26 years – more than any other female singer in American music history. Yet the 45-year old’s new album, Windy City, is her first solo recording since the last millennium and her only release of any kind since 2011. What took her so long?

The truth, she tells me, is that in recent years she has been having chronic problems with that voice. “They call it dysphonia, which is a fancy word for being hoarse,” she says. “Your throat will tighten up. It’s like you’re singing through a little teeny straw. It drives you crazy.”

She tried physical therapy but to no avail. In 2015, she even lost her voice on stage at the start of a gig in Utah with her five-piece band Union Station. “I got up to sing the first verse, opened my mouth and… nothing,” she says. “It was terrible, embarrassing.” Her bandmate Dan Tyminski stepped in to save the day.

Krauss, who also has a long history of debilitating migraines, belatedly came to the conclusion that her vocal problems were psychological as much as physical. “You hear about writer’s block. Well, I think there’s singer’s block too,” she says. “I just couldn’t get clear enough to give a true performance. It would feel contrived to me, and I couldn’t stand to hear myself.”

During recording sessions for Windy City (which began in 2013), she became so frustrated that she went to see the renowned Nashville vocal coach Ron Browning. “It took him about two minutes to tell me exactly what it was,” she says. “He just said, ‘ You’ve got too much on your desk, you’re too distracted, that’s why you’re creating false emotion.’ And he was right. It’s a mental thing that causes a physical thing.”

Windy City – a gorgeous collection of bittersweet numbers from the Fifties and Sixties which this week went straight to the top of the US Billboard country chart – suggests that her ongoing work with Browning (and her following of his advice to declutter her life) is already paying off.

When I meet Krauss in a London hotel, she looks fantastic, with the piled-up hair and accentuated make-up of a classic country diva. “I don’t usually look like this,” she protests, laughing. “I did television this morning, so you’re seeing leftover face and hair.”

She laughs at the idea that big hair is de rigueur for country music stars. “Maybe that’s what’s giving me headaches,” she jokes. “I need to rest my hair. It’s so big, it’s putting a strain on my neck.”

If Krauss is not exactly a household name in Britain, it is probably because she operates mainly in bluegrass and country roots genres, where she is recognised as a virtuoso fiddle player as well as a vocalist. Growing up in an artistic household in Illinois – her mother is a painter, her father a German teacher – Krauss learnt classical violin but switched to fiddle at the age of eight, joined a band aged 12 and signed her first record deal at 16.

Although she alternates between solo and Union Station projects, she considers herself part of an

‘I got up, opened my mouth and… nothing’

Robert Plant “Robert’s got so much character in his voice – it doesn’t really matter what he’s doing down there, it’s captivating.”