Interviewer: Fernando Navarro, El Pais, November 2021

THE MUSICIANS RETURN AS A DUO WITH A NEW ALBUM AFTER THE GREAT SUCCESS OF THEIR COLLABORATION IN 2007

Few musical couples gave as much to talk about as they did: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. He, singer of Led Zeppelin and blessed god of rock of the seventies, when rock was a religion. She, singer and violinist of Union Station and star of bluegrass, a musical genre that is part of American identity as the Colorado canyon of her landscape. Both got together in 2007, recorded an album and became the musical sensation of the year, an unprecedented duo that monopolized covers, recognition from all fronts and so many successes in the form of awards that it was dizzying to look at the list. However, after a year of world tour full of applause, they separated. Nothing was heard again about the Plant & Krauss tandem, the couple that dignified music of American roots with a masterful touch. They separated, but it was only one until later. Never a definitive goodbye. Because the perfect couple is back.

“We always talked about wanting to recover our collaboration, but we never set a date. We don’t have easy agendas, but it’s also true that we didn’t want to do it out of obligation. It had to be natural. When you are busy, you are busy. It hasn’t been a problem to wait so long either,” explains Robert Plant (West Bromwich, 73 years old) in a video call conversation. The British musician speaks sitting next to Alison Krauss (Decatur, 50 years old). Both connect from Nashville, cradle of country, where they have recorded Raise the Roof, their new album, released in November, which sneaked into several lists of the best of last year for the Anglo-Saxon music press. “Nashville is the great music center. If you have an idea, it is a perfect place to expand it. You just need to pick up the phone, and quickly, people will appear prepared to execute that idea and also add a new vision. Session musicians, composers, arrangers… Here, everything revolves around music,” says Plant. To which Krauss intervenes to add: “The previous album was recorded almost everything in Los Angeles, but we thought it was good to do it here. We belong to this city. We are all connected to it. Even T-Bone Burnett lives in it.”

T-Bone Burnett is the prestigious producer of the album. He was Bob Dylan’s guitarist and was at the controls of the sound of Roy Orbison, Elvis Costello, Diana Krall and Elton John in their association with Leon Russell. He was chosen to produce and take care of Raising Sand, the previous and praised work of Plant and Krauss, which won six Grammy Awards in 2008, including Album of the Year and Recording of the Year. Now he repeats again with the couple, after having also teamed up with the bluegrass singer on the soundtrack of the movie Cold Mountain. “He is a natural person. He works very well with him,” Krauss says. “In addition, he is very respected everywhere. He is respected in rock and roll, country, folk, acoustic format…, even in cinema. When you are with him, you perceive that naturalness to understand music. It always suggests things that are easy to understand, which fit into the song, making it grow naturally. He is very careful with everything, he looks at the details and it is very nice to have him around.”

“”All this music is in danger,” regrets Alison Krauss. “The venues, the labels, the festivals… Before there was a scene”

If in Raising Sand the duo revisited artists such as Gene Clark, The Everly Brothers, Townes Van Zandt or Tom Waits, now Raise the Roof contains new versions of The Everly Brothers themselves, as well as important names in American music such as Merle Haggard, Calexico, Allen Toussainto Bert Jansch. “We had many options on the table. Those songs with which we had empathy prevailed,” Plant explains. “Heart,” he says in Spanish. “Each song chosen had to transmit passion, emotion, power, a certain drama. We had to stop at some point because we liked them a lot, right?” Krauss nods and laughs: “Oh, yes, he gave us for more than one album!”

In the end, they have released 14 songs that, as in Raising Sand, revalue music with American roots, including ‘High and Lonesome’, composed by Plant with T-Bone Burnett. Genres such as country, folk, gospel, elrhythm and blues or soul are cited in the voices and good work of Krauss and Plant. Also blues, an indispensable style of the imaginary American state, only on this occasion looking at an unjust stranger: Geeshie Wiley, the “enigmatic” singer and composer of Louisiana, in the words of Plant, diver of the sounds of blues as she already demonstrated with Led Zeppelin. He is passionate and talks about it without measuring time: “This song remembers that the original blues always had something magical, legendary. It was like a potion that listeners took to connect with other realities. Geeshie Wiley was a great creator, who transmitted very well the reality of black people in southern America, but giving it a touch of imagination. We have received poets like Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Lemon, but she was too.”

During the talk, the Briton shows that the team ran more on its own than for Krauss. However, tandem is understood to be wonderful. “I’m lucky,” he says about the opportunity to sing with her again. “I’m a big fan of Robert,” she says. To which he jokingly responds that, really, it has to be because it is very difficult to sing together: “I’m wrong many times and she has to fix it!” It’s not the only thing that seems to need to be fixed. Without irony, Krauss aggravates the tone of voice to ensure that the music they defend is in danger of extinction: “All this music is in danger. The locals, the labels, the festivals… There was a bigger scene a long time ago. When we started with Union Station, there was that scene. Now we see that things have been waning. It’s a reality. Another problem must be added: the first generation of creators left. They are gone. That’s also bad. The music goes with them.” And Plant finishes: “I don’t know this circuit like her. I have been to a handful of festivals, but if I look at my country (United Kingdom) we are talking about a horror story.”

A story that has in this couple an extraordinary tandem, of two enthusiastic fighters, two voices against the current of the times, which, in the case of Robert Plant, goes in the opposite direction of what everyone expects from him and the immense checks on the table that they offer him every year to meet Led Zeppelin again. Are you still discarding the big meeting? “I’m no longer a sailor, now I’m a captain!” Plant roars with a pirate laugh and in good Spanish, to make it very clear.