Bluegrass and country superstar Alison Krauss talks to Richard McComb about her bruised heart and her quest for emotional contentment.
Talking to acclaimed singer Alison Krauss, America’s undisputed queen of bluegrass, can be likened to listening to one of her albums.
The experience leaves me wondering if I should stick a consoling arm around her tiny shoulders (difficult, admittedly, when she’s in Tennessee and I’m in the UK) or laugh like a moonshine-fuelled mountain man when she goofs around.
Her songs, which have sold millions and garnered 26 Grammys – a record for a woman – tell of love, heartache and loss, yet Krauss makes it all sound so beautiful that you almost hanker for the next break-up.
The soulful patterns of her clear-as-a-bell voice, her interpretation of roots music and her fragile honesty (you could throw in mesmerising musicianship, too) explains why tickets for Krauss’s show at Birmingham Symphony Hall sold out long ago, even though her name is far from household status this side of the Atlantic.
Things may be about to change. Paper Airplane, her new album, debuted at a career best Number 11 in the UK Top 40. In the States, it entered the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart at Number 3 and was Number 1 on both the Bluegrass Albums Chart and the Country Albums Chart.
The reality is that Krauss is so loved by her fans she does not need to launch a wild round of media promotion each time she releases a record or goes on tour. The 40-year-old from Champaign, Illinois is doing only three press interviews for her British dates, which include four nights at the Royal Festival Hall.
Paper Airplane is her first album of new material with her band Union Station since 2004’s Lonely Runs Both Ways. The mega musical milestone between these recordings was her effervescent collaboration with Robert Plant in 2007. Raising Sand, which alone picked up six Grammys, including album and record of the year, was a stunning and unexpected successes. Krauss’s hauntingly pure voice, which by default is described as angelic, sounded like it was born to be played off and layered with the mellowed rasp of the ex-Led Zeppelin frontman.
I tell Krauss how Plant is a local hero in Birmingham. “You must be very proud,” she says, genuinely pleased at our good fortune.
She reveals she visited the rock god’s home in Worcestershire in 2008 during the Raising Sand tour, which featured a show where they smouldered on stage at Birmingham’s National Indoor Arena.
Might Plant pop in when she plays Symphony Hall on Friday?
“I hope so, if he’s in town,” she says. “He’s been over here [in the States]. I just saw him. We played in Austin, Texas, and he came out there. If he’s at home when we come through I’m sure we’ll see him.”
After her musical forays with one of rock’s wilder men, Paper Airplane sees Krauss, a fiddle player extraordinaire, return to home territory with her 14th album.
Alison is back in Kraussland. It is a place of deep oceans and dry prairies and of shady stoops where boys fall in love with the girl next door, then break their hearts.
If you are unfamiliar with the singer’s musical and emotional sensibilities, these lines from the new album’s eponymous title song are a good place to start: “How many days should I smile with a frown/’Cause you’re not around with the sun on your shoulders?/And how many nights must I wake up alone/And know in my soul that it’s almost over now ...”
And that ain’t the half of it.
Krauss says she has lived through the pain. If she hadn’t, she explains, she couldn’t sing about it. For her, the turmoil of love is an artistic truth.
There is something of Alison Krauss in all her albums, she says, perhaps even more so with Paper Airplane. “They’re all very personal, but this one really is. I think the older you get, the more things have to be true,” says Krauss.
