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Alison Krauss
For Alison Krauss, records are not just made. First, they must be inspired. “I just wait,” she says. “I just wait.” Eventually something, somehow, somewhere comes along, even if that first spark might later, to outside eyes, appear to have only the most mysterious connections to what it has inspired. But nothing will happen until it arrives, and so patience is required. “I never know till it gets there,” she says. “It just shows up.” Over the years, these starting points have often been images. There are two paintings, for instance, on adjacent walls in the front room of her Nashville home. The larger is of some blossoming trees, a fence and a blast of green behind them, a picture that seems to carry within it some sense of hope and joy. The second is smaller and darker, and shows two wooden buildings. “This one doesn’t have any hope,” she explains. “Nothing good’s going to happen.” She’s made full use of both in the past, and in the way she describes it, it’s quite clear that each of these feelings - hope, and its absence – have been just as important as the other. The mysterious thread that led to her new album, Windy City, began one day in London, several years ago, when she chanced upon a retrospective anthology of pictures by the photographer Bob Richardson. For the next two years, she kept returning to them. There was something about some of these pictures – mostly pictures of girls and women that felt like the Sixties but most importantly had a certain atmosphere or attitude about them - that she would keep returning to. Whatever precise effect they had on her, it percolated and percolated until, at last, she was ready. “There’s just a certain thing that happens,” she explains. “It’s like a thing you know. It’s the truth. And it’s the beginning of knowing I’m going to record. That it’s time to work.” Those photographs were one foundation upon which Windy City would be established. The other followed on from a more prosaic decision - that Alison Krauss would turn the working method she has followed for most of her creative life on its head. “Usually it’s just all songs first,” she says. “It was the first time I’d ever not had songs picked out, and it was just about a person.” The person in question was the veteran Nashville producer and songwriter Buddy Cannon. She had always enjoyed the occasional sessions she’d found herself doing for him over the years, but something else happened when she came in to sing Hank Cochran’s “Make The World Go Away” for Jamey Johnson’s 2012 album Living For A Song. “That was absolutely the moment,” she says. This time she was singing lead not harmony, and she realized that experience was bringing out something different and unexpected in herself. “It’s hard to explain,” she says. “It’s just not about you anymore, it’s just about them. You go: ‘Boy, I’d really like to please that person’. It’s a hard thing to describe, and it can creep up on you, and when you find it, it’s just great. Your inspiration is outside of yourself.” She waited a few months, and this feeling about Buddy Cannon stuck with her - “that I would want to see what I would be if I gave that up to this person” - so she phoned him up. “I don’t do something unless I feel like I’m called to do it. That’s what I felt like, so I honored it. It’s the same feeling of when you know something is right musically, with a song or a batch of songs - the same feeling, but this was attached to a person instead of a batch of songs.” She asked Buddy to make a record with her. Buddy suggested they both search for the right songs. There was a certain feeling she was looking for, and they each set out to find songs that fit. Getting together in Buddy Cannon’s office, they listened to possible contenders and traded suggestions. A few of these songs would be well known, but most of them weren’t, like Willie Nelson’s “I Never Cared For You” and Brenda Lee’s “All Alone Am I”. Some were songs she’d never heard before; some were songs she’d known nearly her whole life, particularly those she brought in from the bluegrass world. At the beginning she laid down one formal parameter: the songs should be older than herself. “I wanted it to be earlier than I remembered,” she explains. And although the two of them subsequently decided to relax those boundaries just a little, it was only to allow in songs that somehow had the same kind of feeling as the others. Some things, it seemed, were meant to be. One day in Buddy Cannon’s office, she mentioned a song that she had heard a brother duo Jim & Jesse sing when she was young at bluegrass festivals. A sweet song that she had loved as a kid and which reminded her of those days: “just so pure and simple and sweet and innocent”. A song called “Dream Of Me”. “I wrote that,” Buddy Cannon told her. “No, you didn’t,” she replied. But he had. “Made me cry,” she says, and explains how she eventually overcame Cannon’s resistance to coerce him to sing backup, with his daughter Melonie, on her version of his own song. It wasn’t, she explains, just about finding songs that were good. Each song had to make sense to her in a way only she could know. “I could never,” she says, “sing anything that didn’t feel real.” She has always felt like that. But as she followed this instinct for the new record, she nonetheless noticed that the songs being chosen were subtly different from the kinds of songs she has tended to favor over the years. Before now, she’d usually been drawn to songs that thrived on the abstract, and on metaphor, and on what they left unsaid. Songs that would leave a lot left to be finished. But these songs, the songs she was choosing for what would become Windy City, were different. Much less abstract. More direct. Both in the stories they told and the feelings they described. As she and Buddy Cannon narrowed down their selection, she would put the original versions of the songs they had chosen on a CD, and drive around, listening to them. As different as they were from each other – spanning different eras and various musical genres, featuring all kinds of vocalists, some male, some female – somehow they already seemed to fit together. “It started to sound like a record,” she says, “before I even started singing it.” Far beyond its musical style, she has come to realize that Windy City’s songs share a unifying sensibility. “You don’t know a theme,” she reflects, “till it’s over.” Mostly, it turned out, these were songs of heartache, but of a distinct and particular kind. “It was loss with strength,” she says. “I didn’t see any weakness in any of the tunes. Someone may have lost, but there wasn’t anything weak about anybody. Which I loved.” What she and Buddy Cannon have created is an unusual and invigorating chimera – an album suffused with sadness that somehow rarely sounds that way. “It’s almost like you didn’t know it was sad,” she says, “because it doesn’t sound weak. It doesn’t have a pitiful part to it, where so many sad songs do. But these don’t. And I love that about it. I love that there’s strength underneath there. That whatever those stories are, they didn’t destroy. That that person made it right through it. I love that.” Always, Alison Krauss has been drawn to songs that feel as though they have always been there. Even when she has sung songs that are new, she has looked for the kind of songs that felt as though they already long existed and had just been stumbled upon. With these older songs on Windy City, she was not so much making them new as inhabiting, and liberating, the very essence that makes each of them eternal. “I think it’s as it should be,” she says, of the album. “A surprise…but not a surprise, I guess. If that makes sense. I didn’t know what it was going to be, but now it’s like it was always there. It just seems like it’s been there all the time.”

Songs

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1
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Whiskey Lullaby
Alison Krauss
2
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When You Say Nothing At All
Alison Krauss & Union Station
3
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Down To The River To Pray
Alison Krauss
4
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I'll Fly Away
Gillian Welch
5
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Baby, Now That I've Found You
Alison Krauss

Albums

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Raise the Roof

Album • 2021
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Lonely Runs Both Ways

Album • 2004
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I Know Who Holds Tomorrow

Album • 1994
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Windy City

Album • 2017
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New Favorite

Album • 2001
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Every Time You Say Goodbye

Album • 1992
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Paper Airplane

Album • 2011
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Forget About It

Album • 1999
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Raising Sand

Album • 2007
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So Long So Wrong

Album • 1997

Singles

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When The Levee Breaks

2024
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It Don't Bother Me

2021
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Paper Airplane

2011
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Do This Life

2023
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High And Lonesome

2021
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Somebody Was Watching Over Me

2021
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Can’t Let Go

2021
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Before the Deluge (Arr. Caroline Shaw)

2021
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The Light Of Christmas Day (From "Love The Coopers" Soundtrack)

2015

Videos

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Alison Krauss and John Waite - Missing You

Alison Krauss • 294K views
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Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On)

Alison Krauss • 105K views

Featured on

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Essential Bluegrass

Playlist • YouTube Music
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Sweet Lullabies

Playlist • YouTube Music
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Country Love Songs

Playlist • YouTube Music
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Newgrass

Playlist • YouTube Music
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Sunset Soundtrack

Playlist • YouTube Music
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'90s Country

Playlist • YouTube Music
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Rustic Ramble

Playlist • YouTube Music
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Cuddling Country

Playlist • YouTube Music
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Classic Hymns

Playlist • YouTube Music
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Country Wedding

Playlist • YouTube Music

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