Bluegrass Runs Both Ways
New studio album by Alison Krauss + Union Station reaches deeper than ever
by Jon Weisberger
Alison Krauss + Union Station
Lonely Runs Both Ways (Rounder)
Alison Krauss has lent her talents to so many projects—for instance, "Whiskey Lullabye," the duet with Brad Paisley that just earned two CMA awards—that it's not only easy to think she might turn up anywhere, but to forget where she makes her musical home. For those who need the reminder, Lonely Runs Both Ways (Rounder), the first studio album in three years by Alison Krauss + Union Station, serves one up in an especially compelling form.
"The democratic nature of a band always seems to lead to an implosion," Tony Brown told Michael McCall in a recent Scene story, but the producer and record exec would have done well to add, "Except when it comes to Alison and the guys." Underlying the seamless beauty and power of the group's music is an exceptional balance of elements that's paid off in stability, not stasis.
By now, there's an AKUS formula of sorts—a division of labor that has, for instance, Krauss singing the melancholy heartbreakers and Dan Tyminski or Ron Block taking the lead on the bluegrass tunes—but it's hardly a simple one. Krauss' singing is rightly at the center of Lonely Runs Both Ways, but she also lays down some smoking fiddle on Jerry Douglas' instrumental, "Unionhouse Branch." Bass player Barry Bales drives "Rain, Please Go Away"—the most elemental bluegrass cut the band's done in years—but that's also him singing a subtle, supportive low tenor on "Restless," the album's moody first single.
At its heart, then, Lonely isn't a breakthrough in the sense that other, highly touted projects released this year have been. The album doesn't go in a new direction; instead, it goes deeper, and the result is a collection on which Alison Krauss + Union Station not only sound more like themselves—which is to say, more different from everyone else—but also more like a bluegrass band than they have in years.
The distinctive part is easy enough to hear. Krauss has always relied on songwriters unknown to or largely overlooked by others, and the material on Lonely emphasizes this. Robert Lee Castleman, who provided the title cut for her 1999 solo album, Forget About It, as well as two songs for 2001's New Favorite, is back with a remarkable four cuts, including "Restless," the regret-filled opener "Gravity" and the title track to his own album of a few years ago, Crazy As Me.
On these, as well as on songs written by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, John Scott Sherrill and Mindy Smith, among others, Krauss sings with heartbreaking clarity and unsurpassed nuance. The rest of the group are right behind her, embedding her voice in a wash of lines and textures that, paradoxically, draw their power from the musicians' restraint. This is the AKUS familiar to the broader audience, the one that's come to the group through the CMT videos, AAA radio airplay, movie soundtracks and TV appearances that followed in the wake of Krauss's unexpected 1995 hit, "When You Say Nothing At All."
At the same time, Lonely Runs Both Ways reveals a renewed engagement with the bluegrass mainstream. The signal comes like a lightning bolt early in the album. The last chords of "Restless" have barely stopped ringing when Block's staccato banjo slams "Rain, Please Go Away"—a decades-old classic from Del McCoury added late in the album's making—into high gear, and the intent couldn't be clearer. "We always have to have a bridge to the original audience," Jerry Douglas says, "and we didn't have it, the starving bluegrass musician, the 'I hate my woman,' the bluegrass breakdown song. So when that one came up, we just all jumped on it at once and that one set us all free."
"Rain, Please Go Away" may be emblematic, but it's hardly alone on the album, and while New Favorite, too, had some unmistakable bluegrass, Lonely's grass entries have a different character, and a different relationship to that "original audience." Up-and-coming North Carolina singer-songwriter Donna Hughes, who wrote "Poor Old Heart," is already making a splash on the national bluegrass scene with her second, self-released album, while "This Sad Song" harks back to Union Station's early days, when it was written by Krauss and the band's banjo player at the time, Alison Brown. (The way Bales flips the bass accents to the off-beat behind Douglas' searing Dobro solo is a reminder that he's also a session player attuned to the genre's latest trends and developments.)
Meanwhile, Ron Block's "I Don't Have To Live This Way" is so firmly built around hardcore bluegrass elements that it may take even the most suspicious bluegrasser a dozen listens before the absence of the songwriter's banjo is noticed. Tyminski's reading of Woody Guthrie's "Pastures of Plenty" owes far more to genre favorite Dave Evans' 1970s version than to the original.
It's a testament to the power of AKUS's musicianship that even during the years when the group seemed to stray the farthest from bluegrass, they had legions of supporters ready to argue with those who charged the group with outright "betrayal"—a silly notion, obviously, but one that was more than occasionally expressed. With the release of Lonely Runs Both Ways, loyalists have some powerful new arguments at their disposal, made without giving up the shimmering beauty of the music that earned the band their stature in the world beyond bluegrass. Lonely may run both ways, but it's clearer than it's ever been that so do Alison Krauss + Union Station.
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