Alison Krauss will release Windy City on February 17, her first effort away from her band Union Station since Raising Sand, the Grammy-award winning collaboration album with rock singer Robert Plant.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
The new album features Alison performing 10 classic songs that she carefully selected with producer Buddy Cannon.
Following Raising Sand and 2011’s Paper Airplane with her longtime collaborators Union Station, which won the GRAMMY Award for Best Bluegrass Album and topped Billboard’s Folk, Country and Bluegrass charts, Alison began to feel the tug of inspiration.
“Usually it’s just all songs first,” she said. “It was the first time I’d ever not had songs picked out, and it was just about a person.”
That person was Cannon, the veteran Nashville producer.
Alison had always enjoyed the occasional recording sessions she did for Cannon. But something else happened when she came in to sing her lead lines on Hank Cochran’s Make The World Go Away for Jamey Johnson’s 2012 album Living For A Song.
“That was absolutely the moment,” she said. “Wow! Buddy really makes me want to do a good job.”
At the beginning Alison thought the songs chosen should be older than herself.
“I wanted it to be earlier than I remembered,” she said. Although the two of them subsequently decided to relax those boundaries just a little.
What they created is an album suffused with sadness that somehow rarely sounds that way.
