Alison Krauss & Union Station Announce First New Album in 14 Years
It’s been 14 years now since Alison Krauss & Union Station transported us with their poignant, dreamy, soundscapes on their album Paper Airplane, which debuted at #1 on the Billboard Country, Bluegrass, and Folk Charts.
On March 28, Alison Krauss & Union Station grace us with their transcendent sounds on the aptly titled new album Arcadia (Down the Road Records). The band — Alison Krauss (fiddle, lead vocal), Jerry Douglas (Dobro, lap steel, vocals), Ron Block (banjo, guitar, vocals), and Barry Bales (bass, vocals) — shares ten songs on Arcadia that evoke a world of pastoral beauty even as they reveal the tragic truths that often dwell within it.
During this decade-plus apart, members of the band have earned a collective total of more than 70 GRAMMY Awards, celebrating successful solo careers and collaborating with other artists. Even so, they continued to search for and to collect music that they might make together again. As Krauss says of the songs on Arcadia: “The stories of the past are told in this music. It’s the whole idea of ‘in the good old days when times were bad.’ There’s so much bravery and valor and loyalty and dreaming, of family and themes of human existence that were told in a certain way when our grandparents were alive. Someone asked me, ‘How do you sing these tragic tunes?’ I have to. It’s a calling. I feel privileged to be a messenger of somebody else’s story. And I want to hear what happened.”
The lead track from the album, “Looks Like the End of the Road,” premieres today. Gentle guitar strums fall softly in the song’s opening measures, creating an eddying undercurrent for Jerry Douglas’s swirling, mournful Dobro phrasings. Krauss’ haunting vocals shimmer as she reflects wistfully on the beauty that’s often surrounded her and the losses that often lie buried within such beauty. On the song’s instrumental bridges, Douglas’ Dobro yearning and melancholy notes play call and response with Krauss’ vocals on the verses and chorus. Krauss comments on “Looks Like the End of the Road”: “Usually, I find something that’s a first song, and then things fall into place. That song was ‘Looks Like the End of the Road.’ Jeremy Lister wrote it, and it just felt so alive—and as always, I could hear the guys already playing it.”
On Arcadia, the band also welcomes guitarist and vocalist Russell Moore, best known as the front man of IIIrd Tyme Out, to the Union Station lineup.
In support of their new album, Alison Krauss & Union Station will be performing at 75 dates across North America, kicking off on April 17.
