Robert Plant and Alison Krauss reunite
The first time they collaborated was such a surprise smash that the only question was when Robert
Plant and Alison Krauss would sing together again. The answer is out this week.
Plant and Krauss — he jokingly calls them “Sonny and Cher” — are back with a new album of covers, 14 years after their surprise hit with critics and fans, “Raising Sand.”
“It’s great to do this again and for it to have new life,” says Krauss on the phone alongside Plant from Sound Emporium Studios in Nashville, Tennessee.
The new album, “Raise the Roof,” out Friday from Rounder Records, follows the blueprint of the first, including many of the same musicians and the producing smarts of T Bone Burnett.
The recording was completed just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
So much time had past between recording sessions that Plant admits he was apprehensive that if the team didn’t find the right material quickly, they wouldn’t recapture their special alchemy.
The new album has Plant and Krauss singing deep cuts by Merle Haggard, Allen Toussaint, The Everly Brothers, Anne Briggs, Geeshie Wiley, Ola Belle Reed and Bert Jansch. There’s also a Plant-Burnett original, “High and Lonesome.”
“A great song has many lifetimes,” says Plant and Krauss agrees. “You want them to have a life of their own and you have to have a very loose grip on those ideas so that they do become their own,” she says.
The first pairing of former Led Zeppelin singer
Plant with bluegrass violinist and singer Krauss generated platinum sales and earned six Grammy Awards in 2009.
“The main surprise was, ‘Wow, these guys actually can operate together?’ It was against the odds,” says Plant. “It’s a sharing of something, a sharing of songs, that people didn’t know anything about. It’s one of my big trips in life.”
They’ll tour together in 2022.