Robert Plant and Alison Krauss: grace and magic, what else?

November 19, 2021 Robert Plant and Alison Krauss they released the album “Raise the Roof” following up their first and excellent album as a couple, “Raising Sand” in 2007. Below you can read our review of the album and listen to some songs.

Fourteen years after the successful and deserving “Raising Sand”, which earned decisive critical acclaim and a more than appreciable response from the public, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have returned to put their talents at the service of music and songs publishing the second chapter of their partnership, “Raise the Roof”. The team that wins doesn’t change, goes an evergreen adage and so in the control room always sits the talented T Bone Burnett who is also a member of the band that accompanies the former voice of Led Zeppelin and the award-winning American country bluegrass singer and violinist. Backing band that benefits, now as then, from the guitar skills of Marc Ribot and the rhythmic department made up of Dennis Crouch and Jay Bellerose, bass and drums respectively. Other noble strings present in “Raise the Roof” are those of jazz player Bill Frisell, of Los Lobos David Hidalgo, of Buddy Miller here also on mandolin, while Stuart Duncan takes care of banjo, mandolin and violin.

Plant & Krauss’s references to their previous episode can also be seen in the choice of songs proposed which on a couple of occasions draw again from the repertoire of the Everly Brothers (“The Price of Love”) and Allen Toussaint (“Trouble with my Lover” ).

And, absolutely, in the inexhaustible songbook of American roots songs, whether folk, blues or country. In reality, at least in a couple of cases (“Go Your Way” by Anne Briggs and “It Don’t Bother Me” by Bert Jansch) it is the English folk music very dear to the son of Albion Robert Plant that is reread. In “Raise the Roof” there is also an unreleased song, “High and Lonesome”, signed by Plant and Burnett – incidentally, perhaps the most rock episode of the entire album – and the reprise of a song – the one that opens the record – relatively recent, “Quattro (World Drifts In)”, taken from Calexico’s fourth album “Feast of Wire” from 2003.

Fourteen years later the magic that permeated “Raising Sand” returned to hover in “Raise the Roof”, the voices of Robert and Alison – so distant, but so close – are perfectly supported by a punctual and impeccable band, in terms of magic is certainly not second to the main protagonists, who gives the songs something that is a rare commodity: grace. Listening to the album enchants and hypnotizes, the lyrics of the songs tell of loves that ended badly, of painful stories that once concluded leave a legacy of ghosts to live with for eternity, joy in the strict sense and serenity do not live in these places. For the future it remains easy to wish them and us that there may be space and time for a new meeting between the two in the recording studio.