Alison Krauss

Windy City

DECCA/CAPITOL. CD/DL

Grammy award-winning ‘voice of country’ raids the classics songbook. After 2007’s Raising Sand, her inspired pairing with Robert Plant, Alison Krauss returned to more familiar territory and her usual backing group Union Station for 2011’s Paper Airplanes. Windy City was produced by Nashville studio guru Buddy Cannon, and contains 10 classic songs by Willie Nelson and Glen Campbell among others; some deliberately chosen from before Krauss was born. These measured readings of Gentle On My Mind, Brenda Lee’s Losing You and Nelson’s I Never Cared For You stay faithful to the originals, while a lively take on Poison Love, made popular by bluegrass kingpin Bill Monroe, is a welcome change of pace after back-to-back ballads. Truthfully, Krauss’s voice could bring gravitas and emotion to the Southern Rail timetable, and Windy City is a rather safe album. That said, any number of modern country vocalists would probably kill to sound this safe – and this good.