photo credit: David McClister

***

“I was busy singing the lines to the song and she was singing on top of me,” Robert Plant recalls of the first time he performed with Alison Krauss. “Then I did a sort of dip, a vocal slide. That’s when she looked at me quizzically and said, ‘Why did you do that?’ I told her: ‘It just felt like the right place to do something different.’ Her response was: ‘Well, how in heaven’s name am I supposed to harmonize with you when you don’t even know what you’re going to do next? What chance have I got?’ That’s when I knew this was going to be good fun.”

The occasion on which the genial Plant received this critique was a rehearsal for the November 2004 Lead Belly tribute at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Following a corresponding creative adjustment, the teaming of Led Zeppelin’s audacious frontman with Union Station’s virtuoso fiddle player and crystalline vocalist generated equal measures of wonder and acclaim.

That evening initiated a musical relationship that would go on to yield the 2007 album Raising Sand. For that record, Plant and Krauss partnered with producer T Bone Burnett on a collection of songs that both challenged and affirmed prevailing conceptions of Americana with a harmony-rich amalgam of warm and at times atmospheric country and rockabilly covers. Raising Sand generated sweeping acclaim, winning five Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.

More than 14 years later, the duo has reunited with Burnett, celebrating the occasion by naming their follow-up Raise the Roof. The record extends their sonic perambulations into new locales, guided by signposts from British folk icons Bert Jansch and Anne Briggs, as well as the enigmatic American blues artist Geeshie Wiley.

The original idea for a pairing that once seemed idiosyncratic, but now feels inevitable, came from journalist Bill Flanagan. He reflects, “I was working on the Country Music Television series Crossroads, on which rock and country artists teamed up for an hour of duets. We were looking for a rock singer to pair with Alison and I suggested Robert. They both have mystery in their voices, that high keening that suggests a connection to something way back in time. Alison responded very favorably to the suggestion. I called Robert and pitched him, asked him to call Alison and talk to her. He did and they hit it off and from there, they took the collaboration to places I never dreamed of.”

While the CMT Crossroads appearance would wait until 2008, Plant seized on a more immediate opportunity to work with Krauss. “The idea of being invited to Cleveland to pay some respect to Lead Belly made me feel like a usurper,” Plant acknowledges, “but it was quite an event with Odetta, Harry Belafonte and Gatemouth Brown. After I got the invite, I thought it would be a good thing to see where we could take this, so that we weren’t yet another blues band playing ‘In the Pines.’ I wanted to bring in the more obscure ideas of ‘Green Corn’ and ‘Sukey Jump.’ I thought the fiddle and the harmonies we hoped to have would be perfect for that.”

Following their performance in Cleveland, Plant and Krauss maintained an ongoing dialogue that ultimately led them into the studio with Burnett for a true collaborative venture, in which all three shared veto power on the material. “They both have mystical tones,” Burnett explains, while identifying his initial—and ongoing—ardor for the project.

“They both have transcendent tones that conjure all sorts of feeling and soul. I heard two mystical voices singing together, creating a whole other sound that I hadn’t really heard. It doesn’t sound like The Everly Brothers or The Louvin Brothers. It’s not an old-time country thing or a rock-and-roll thing. It doesn’t sound like anything really because the two of them are so studied in such wide fields of music that they created an original blend.”

Plant and Krauss maintained their creative frisson during a global tour in support of Raising Sand that extended into 2009. Krauss explains that a second album remained on their minds, even if it necessitated a long gestation period. “We sent songs back and forth for almost 15 years with the intent of doing another record,” she reveals, “but it was important to both of us that the next one would have its own identity. I believe ‘Can’t Let Go’ [the sixth track on Raise the Roof] was the first thing I sent to Robert, so that one had been hanging around a long time. There was a period when Union Station played a lot of festivals with Lucinda Williams. I’d hear her on stage singing that song and I’d think, ‘Oh my gosh, that’d be so much fun as a duet.’ So I sent that to him years ago.

“In 2019, he sent me a batch of tunes that included the Calexico song [‘Quattro (World Drifts In)’]. I burned it onto a CD so I could listen while I was driving, and I know exactly where I was when I heard it. My immediate reaction was ‘Oh, that sounds like the first song.’ I thought the melody was so beautiful, and the way it felt was great. When I hear a piece of music that I’m going to have a long relationship with, there’s a feeling that comes with it. There’s a spark of inspiration that I don’t have other places. It’s a familiar feeling I’ve had over the years. So that was the song where I said, ‘Ahhhh, we’re going back in.’”

Plant and Krauss entered the studio in late 2019 and, once again, brought their own sensibilities to bear on the material. In addition to musicians who appeared on the first album, like Jay Bellerose (drums), Dennis Crouch (bass) and Marc Ribot (guitar), they also welcomed some new players, including guitarists Bill Frisell, Buddy Miller and David Hidalgo.

“I have a theorem or a belief that I don’t care what anybody plays, I just care who’s playing it,” Burnett says. “I want people to bring their spirits and their experiences into a session. I don’t invite musicians in to play my ideas or anything like that. I bring them in to collaborate and contribute and to put their whole selves into it.”

This approach proved particularly well-suited to the matter at hand. “Quattro (World Drifts In)” opens the album—just as Krauss had envisioned— but it occupies a very different space from Calexico’s original, due to Krauss’ nuanced, haunting reading.

“It’s a mysterious song and that’s one of the things I love about it,” Burnett offers. “But one of the things it does seem to be about is war, with burning fields and poppy fields. When they sent that song to me, I thought, ‘This is like, choppering into Afghanistan.’ That’s how it felt to me. So I wanted it to have a little of that feeling of war. I love the way Coppola used ‘The End’ in Apocalypse Now, the way he used a disturbing pop song to represent the conditions over there.”

The producer then shares his thoughts on the Raise the Roof’s second song, a take on The Everly Brothers’ “The Price of Love,” which similarly feels more foreboding than the original: “Alison cares about intensity. She’s been in a bluegrass band for so many years that she’s probably played her fill of fast music. She’s always looking to slow things down and to create intensity. So this new version is a much more intense version than the one The Everly brothers did. It’s this really beautiful song about consequences. It’s a moralistic song, really. It’s got that Southern evangelical kind of moralism about it, which I always love putting in the hands of Robert Plant because he just scares the pants off of all those people.

“The Everly Brothers version was geared toward the radio in 1965, which wasn’t really looking for intensity at the time,” Burnett continues. “They were looking to make a hit record, which isn’t something that we take into consideration. We’re not thinking about appealing to what’s current at radio or in the marketplace or any of that. We were just doing stuff that we really love, that moves us, that we feel we can add something to.”

Plant points to the recording of Allen Toussaint’s “Trouble With My Lover” as the moment when the album took on its own singular identity. “It became a tangible project for me, something with variety and stretch, once we got that groove,” he says, “It was integral really. It was a good pitch because Alison was not sure that she could bring it home, and it was just such a curve because she really made it her own song. When something like that happens, you know that you’re not actually going to type. There’s a Robert Plant type of style and there’s a song to fit that. But I think, on this particular collection of songs, Alison has really taken the driving wheel and she’s gone into areas and performances which are quite a long way from what her normal zone is.”

Krauss considers the full sweep of their collaboration as she shares her own thoughts on their musical comfort zones. “Robert had never been a harmony singer,” she observes. “His voice has been associated with such power and it has such a heroic quality. Then, when you hear him singing all of those, gruff, rough things in a humble way and with such humility, it’s stunning. It hurts. Another word that comes to mind is romantic.

“There’s also a quality in all of this where the things that should have never worked end up being the reasons that they did. Robert and I create a very beautiful duet the way that we sound together, and it’s because of that contrast. The things that never should have made it work are the things that made it work.”

***

While this album wasn’t created during quarantine, some elements hearken back to a time when families were self-contained units who would gather in the parlor and play music together for entertainment.

ROBERT PLANT: It’s funny because, as you say that, I can take it back to the moment I knocked on Alison Krauss’ front door one Sunday morning in Nashville. The door opened and the two of them were standing there, T Bone and Alison. They invited me in and then that’s exactly what we did. We went into the parlor, picked up an acoustic guitar and started singing. The only thing that wasn’t happening was there was no blazing fire.

I didn’t know these people very well. I had never met T Bone. At that time, I was used to kicking up a psychedelic rumpus with my buddies. I was coming from a Portishead/Jah Wobble area, where I would sing and then hit a pedal on the floor, so my voice almost became a noise. To take all that away and reduce it down to the essence, sitting there in the parlor on a Sunday at midday, made me feel naked.

I’ve heard that T Bone came in prepared for your initial meeting. Did he bring in a collection of potential songs or was it more about tone and vibe?

ALISON KRAUSS: At the very beginning, both Robert and I each said to each other that we didn’t want to produce it. Then we talked about T Bone, who was a perfect person to ask. He said that he’d love to do it and he made this whole—I don’t want to say presentation— it was more like a beautiful explanation of what he wanted to do.

He put together a list of songs, which was his way of saying, “This is what I’m thinking.” Robert and I could see right away that it was quite different from what we had done before. T Bone said, “My goal is to get both of you very uncomfortable.” [Laughs.]

As we progressed, all of us brought in songs. With this new record, there were even more songs going back and forth. It’s a very easy and natural process that involves the three of us equally. When we’re going through songs and listening to things, nobody digs in their heels about anything. No one goes, “Oh, we really need to do this one” when the other two aren’t feeling it or when two are feeling it and the other one doesn’t. The whole thing’s unanimous.

What did you take away from the making of Raising Sand that prepared you for the new album and possibly other studio sessions that happened in the interim?

AK: The process of working with Robert and T Bone is different than working with Union Station and my own records because T Bone has such a personality with his production. So you kind of step back from a lot of your expectations because T Bone is going to see things differently. “After I began singing with Robert in the studio that first time, I started looking at recording completely differently,”  Krauss acknowledges. 

Both Robert and myself have to put some of our initial instincts aside, as far as how to arrange something or the treatment of the tune. T Bone is such an incredible caster of musicians and something will turn out much differently than I initially imagined in my mind. So part of my job is to wait.

Some of this process also has involved undoing what we know. Robert won’t sing the same thing twice and he’s had to sing these parts with a consistency he’s never had to have before. You have to have some consistency doing harmonies because people are singing at the same time.

Bluegrass people grow up singing harmony. So depending on whether you’re in a trio or a quartet, you’ve got three or four people singing with you all the time and they’ll kick you out of the car if you’re not consistent. [Laughs.] That was the method I grew up with—you might take liberty on a verse you’re singing but if you’re not consistent on the harmonies, then they’re going to kill you.

With Robert, I’ve come to recognize that there is a much more off-the-cuff way we do this, and he knows it’s much more regimented. We meet somewhere in the middle and it’s worked out.

But after I began singing with Robert in the studio that first time, I started looking at recording completely differently. I watched how he captured a moment in time when he’d sing his leads. It totally freed me up to see him sing like that. I didn’t ever record myself the same again.

RP: Alison is one of the most magnificent harmonists on the planet. She goes to those places because she spent years and years there. While I was going nuts somewhere in India or southern Morocco, she was working on all the various options and directions of the other vocal parts outside of the melody line. It’s a science and a magnificent one. I was learning Maghrebi Arabic and she was learning how to do that.

In the bluegrass world, the actual triumph of that work has been the close harmonies. It’s incredibly impressive when you hear the great undulations of vocals in The Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain stuff. In Alison’s case, the number of people she’s sung with who are incredible singers is amazing.

Over the last 15 years, I have relished this whole new world I’ve found. There was really no awareness of it in the U.K. That’s true of country music itself because national radio never gave us anything to relish in that genre. The radio here was just the worst, second only to Germany in how bad the opportunities were. There were no radio stations giving you what was going down in Tennessee or Houston.

When I heard Little Richard, Conway Twitty and people like that, I found my path out. That was where I could flee the life that was so ordained for me. But when it comes to the place that I now love so much, the door never really got opened for me.

At this point in my own haphazard way, I feel a part of it. At least I feel like I’m getting more and more au fait with it for what it really is. I don’t know whether I’m actually part of it, I may be lucky to get in on the corner or something.

But it was the least likely thing that would ever happen. I think that’s why Alison and I both really leaned into it. Not only was it fun, it was totally improbable. It’s not venerable, it’s a new sort of hybrid. It’s another place to be and it’s pretty cool.

Is it possible to characterize the songs that are ideal for this setting?

AK: The initial thing in this process is that I’m looking for poetry that’s true coming from me. I don’t like to sing something that is not true for me and what might make it true for me may not be what makes it true for another person. What makes art so magical is that nobody has the exact same experience that another person has.

There’s not a specific type of song because all of them are so different and I’m unable to prejudge what my feelings would be. That’s why the feeling is so exciting because it’s always a surprise.

So I’m looking for poetry that’s true coming from me and that feels like my partnership with Robert. It has to make sense language-wise with Robert and myself. I’m also thinking about where the harmony’s going to go because that’s what we’re doing too.

I have songs in bins at my house that I’ve had for 25-30 years. I heard them and I absolutely loved them but they haven’t found their time yet. I might love a song but I’m waiting for the right moment for it to be my personal expression. You don’t know why it’s not now, you just know it’s not. You’re gathering things. I’m not a songwriter, I’m an interpreter. So they come out when there’s the right feeling.

Another thing that has made this so much fun and so interesting is the stuff that we each bring to the table. I don’t know about the music that Robert knows about and vice versa. He’s not going to hear songs that I grew up with. There are heroes in my world that he didn’t come across, just like I didn’t know about Bert Jansch and Anne Briggs. They’re heroes over there and, when I heard them, it was so emotional that it hurt. I asked myself: “How did I live this long without knowing about them?” I can remember exactly where I was and what I was looking at when I heard them. It was like a positive traumatic event.

It’s so inspiring to hear and see things that are beautiful and bring new thoughts. There’s nothing like it.

RP: The thing about our trip together— myself and Alison—is we’re transposing other people’s music and developing our own signature performance of it. It’s a meld of these various songs, bearing in mind that they come from somebody else’s imagination in the first place. Through the process of presenting them to each other, creating an ebb and flow of how we want to put these things into our world, even if we weren’t that enamored with the results, we still would have gone a long way to understanding each other a bit more. That’s at the heart of what we’re doing and why we do it.

I was pleased to take British music that, to me—in my time—was there on my back pages and had not really seen the light of day in America, like the Jansch story. I think Pentangle played the Fillmore a few times in the early ‘70s with John Renbourn and Jacqui McShee. They were really quite amazing.

[Anne Briggs’] “Go Your Way My Love” is stacked with everything that suits me as a singer. I also enjoy the actual lyrical theme—and the fact that it was written in another time, which is not so far away from my life but also when things were a lot different for us. That sort of subterranean folk world was looking after itself and keeping well away from commerciality. There was the huge hippie movement from the U.K. through Western Europe, across Turkey into Afghanistan and on to India. The hippie trail was a great thoroughfare and people came back with stories and also with modification of guitar tunings. They were twisting the music around.

I think the story that she weaves together is beautiful and it’s got so much pathos and a reluctance to actually consider that the character is never coming home. It’s a beautiful story, very demure and heartfelt. I think it works strongly for me as a mature singer.

Then you have “Last Kinds Words,” the Geeshie Wiley song. When you first hear that, it drives a great big cleft through your imagination of what the blues idiom actually is. We’re familiar with so many remarkable pieces of Afro-American poetry within the blues structure, which seems to be a very simple canvas. Then you get this song and you turn a corner and you go, “Wow!” It’s very specific in the way it talks about the war over in Germany. There are things going on that take you far away from a lot of the clichés that people use in rock-and-roll and the different musical forms. With the blues, there’s quite a lot of, “the sun’s going to shine on my back door someday” type of stuff. Then you turn a corner and you’re talking about the birds taking away the body. It’s otherworldly.

How important is it when interpreting a song to understand its back story?

RP: You don’t think about the revelation in the first form. The songs stand for what they are, no matter their history or their mystique. They beckon you, and you have to decide if you can actually do something with them.

Then, once you’ve captured something, you can have this almost revelatory moment and think, “Wait a minute, where is this song from?” You start looking into the interesting little vignettes that accompany the songs.

There’s that Greil Marcus book where he brings Geeshie Wiley into the real world [Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations, which draws on the limited knowledge of her life to imagine some theoretical occurrences]. Through some strange phenomena, Geeshie Wiley ends up with her friend in the crowd at a state fair in 1955 watching a white kid sing the blues and that kid is Elvis. It’s that mystic biscuit fiction that we all long for. The idea of that happening is quite something.

But all the songs stood for what they were. Then later on, you have that afterburn, the afterglow of the whole deal where Alison didn’t know about Bert Jansch or Anne Briggs any more than I knew about Ralph Stanley a few years ago. That’s one of the great things about our friendship and our synergies. I’ll include T Bone as well because his energy and heat source is second to none. It’s remarkable.

AK: There has to be a timelessness about a song. I’m looking for something lyrically timeless, where I can have many ideas about where I might be standing when I’m imagining it. It can be an era hundreds of years ago because the things that make us human never change. However, I do find that those timeless songs change as you age. The pictures that come to your mind when you’re singing something or hearing something often will change.

Raise the Roof offers songs that may be new to listeners, as well as songs that are presented in a new way. When The Everly Brothers performed “The Price of Love” it was much more playful and innocent than the version on this album. Can you talk about the process of uncovering what’s beneath the surface?

AK: There’s a great bluegrass singer who used to announce this one particular song, by saying, “This is a happy, sad song.” It was funny but, when I thought about it, I realized she was right because the melody was so joyful, but it was paired with this really desperate lyric.

That’s also true of The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly and a lot of bluegrass songs. What I always say about Stevie Wonder is he combines music that makes you feel happy with a powerful lyric that has depth and weight. That combination is stunning. When you hear it, you don’t even know what happened to you.

Either Robert or T Bone brought up doing that song and I said, “Let’s slow it down.” Then, when that joyful kind of tempo went away and I was the one singing—the gender changed—it became a very different story. It uncovered the lyric in that moment. That’s the testimony of those songs. Beautiful poetry, beautiful melody has many lives.

I should add that [drummer] Jay Bellerose is like no one else. It usually starts there with him, where he feels something going and then everybody starts to play off of that and I sing off of that. The tracking experience with T Bone, Robert and this band is very exciting as far as watching something come together because T Bone never wants to squash anybody’s personality. He hires them because of their personality and how they play that identity. They’re such personal players.

RP: The bottom line is that I think the original Everlys performance was almost a prophetic thing, like a little slogan that fell out of a Christmas cracker. It was almost like you were being taught a lesson. You were being warned by the kind of twist in the lyric and the tempo and drive of the song. I think at that particular time the Everlys had really toughened up quite a lot. They cut “Temptation” around that time which they really killed, too. So it was almost like they were telling us this was something that we needed to know about, whereas Alison just wraps herself around it and makes us all feel that it’s never going to be as good as it was. I think that’s pretty cool.

There’s a new Robert Plant/T Bone Burnett composition on the album, “High and Lonesome.” Did you always plan on including an original?

RP: No, it came together because of where we were and who we were with. The magic was there. And the guy who was sort of mixing it in the cauldron has a very beautiful, organic overview of what we’re doing so that it’s never too fancy. T Bone brings this magic to the whole deal and strides around with a great sort of verve, then falls in a crumpled heap before jumping up again. We also were in very capable hands with Mike Piersante, the guy who does the engineering.

So we were in the right place and that led us to have an original song, which was a bit of a hoot. In between tracks, T Bone brought out his trusty hardboard guitar and he cranked it up with those lipstick pickups and played this kind of ramshackle rhythm. I happen to carry a whole bunch of lyrics with me all the time. So I turned my book upside down, opened it up and off we went. The title “High and Lonesome” is kind of comedic in a way because I really couldn’t be further from the whole high and lonesome deal, although the song itself has its own power to it.

While the Raise the Roof sessions preceded quarantine, there is a wistful longing that lingers throughout the record, at least until the concluding “Somebody Was Watching Over Me.” Was this theme by design, by happenstance or the product of something else?

RP: It wasn’t a conscious theme, although there is a very strong and beautiful restraint in the way that some of these pieces are presented. I wouldn’t call it a melancholia, but there is a wistful thing in the way that a lot of these songs unravel. I credit that to the whole band because there’s a meld between the voices and the way the guys are reading it. I think that in the wrong hands we could have missed it completely.

I think the last song really brought the whole thing around and put a magenta ribbon around it. That’s the restoration at the end of it all when you can finally exhale.

But I suppose it depends on how your spirit is as to whether or not you’ve always been in quarantine.

AK: There was no deliberate choosing of a theme. It’s just feelings. I can’t speak for the other two guys but, for me, it’s a thread of a feeling. That’s why things end up where they do. It’s the same way you sequence a record: How does that flow from one thing to another? Why does it feel good when this song comes after that one and not when you do it the other way? If you love them equally, why did that not work? It’s kind of the same thing.

It’s like stringing together things with an invisible reason. You’re matching feelings and it’s a gut reaction. It’s a kind of immediate inspiration, a really magical feeling. Through the years, I’ve realized that I have to act on that.

It started with the songs. It’s a very natural process. That feeling of wistful longing you describe, when you put those two things together, what does it make? It makes hope. Nothing feels better than that.

When you finally take the stage together again to share the material from Raise the Roof, what do you most eagerly anticipate?

AK: I’m looking forward to playing the Calexico song, and then “Go Your Way.” I really love the way they turned out. There’s also something about just being there.

When you do something live, it happens in the moment and for that moment. It happens for the specific group of people who are in that specific place and will never happen again. It’s a special thing to be a part of. It’s just an incredible experience.

RP: I love to perform. I love the humor of it, the repartee and the shock of it when it works. The idea of giving it a go again and trying to make it work again after all this time will be quite something. Alison and I will be standing side by side, looking at each other out of the corners of our eyes and trying not to giggle.