Alison Krauss is 30 now, but she's been old since she was 15. That's when she sang, "Sitting all alone with my whiskey on ice/I wonder why he's not with me tonight." It didn't matter that this was an up-tempo tune and seemingly well beyond Krauss's years in experience. Her voice had the athletic dexterity of her virtuoso fiddle playing, and the brisk tempo and fast-plucked bluegrass strings behind her gave her performance the ageless grace and irrepressible sass of a junior Dolly Parton. By the time she got to the high-register chorus, "It's too late to cry because we left it all behind," she was flying.

These days Krauss is at a peak, her depth of experience finally catching up with her outsize talent. Her voice has gained weight, with the barest flutter of vibrato on the outer edges, and a richer high end. And she still makes those dramatic leaps. On "Let Me Touch You for a While," from her current New Favorite (Rounder), she begins with a somber, nearly whispered verse describing some lonesome soul, then jumps to the bright, affirmative chorus: "I don't hardly know you, but I'd be willing to show you/I know a way to make you smile." In a story that could be about a woman comforting a man, another woman, or herself, the first five words of that first line are heart-piercing.

No one does sad better than Krauss, who comes to the Orpheum with her band Union Station this Saturday before going on to Lowell's Tsongas Arena on June 30 as part of the "Down from the Mountain" tour. The one thing she can say for sure about her development as an artist since she was a bright-eyed teenage fiddle champ is that she now knows how to be in that place better than ever.

"When I was a teenager and starting to play, I just overplayed and oversung like crazy," she tells me from her manager's office in Nashville. "And I think that's because you're like [she gasps] `I can sing! I can play! Oh, this is so cool!' And you're not paying attention. It's all so self-indulgent like that, because it's just fun to do. As I've gotten older, it's much more fun to really get inside the tune. The older I get, the more I love feeling sad when I'm singing these sad songs. And to think that I've been singing these songs for X amount of years and, well, it took me 15 years to get a lot of them."

And the sadness of the tunes? "Boy, I love that feeling. I mean, it's real. Such a huge emotion, love-loss -- huge." She adds, laughing, "I'd rather be hit by a car. It's like physical pain. People would rather have that than the other. Everybody's experienced it, everybody knows what it's like." Which is why she describes being inside those sad songs as "such an interesting place to be. It's such an interesting thing to feel for three minutes -- feel the story -- and then another mini-story. And get to tell it." It's a feeling that gives her a catharsis as well as her audience. "I think, `Wow, tonight was really great. It felt so good.' "

Although she was a teen star in the world of bluegrass, familiar to audiences at folk and roots music festivals, Krauss's real breakthrough didn't come until 1995's retrospective collection, Now That I've Found You (Rounder). That album, driven by the single "When You Say Nothing at All" from the compilation Keith Whitley: A Tribute Album, drove her own album to double platinum sales, an unprecedented success for Krauss and for Rounder Records, the Cambridge-based label she's recorded with exclusively under her own name and with Union Station since 1987 (and that despite some reported big temptations from Nashville's heavyweight major labels).

Which is why the current phenomenon of the chart-topping bluegrass-based O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Lost Highway) soundtrack from which the "Down from the Mountain" tour is drawn, including three tracks with Krauss, leaves her sanguine. "I know people are very excited. I know it's affecting us because I know about the record sales. All these people are being introduced to bluegrass music, and to us, too."

But nothing can equal that first flush of stardom Krauss and Union Station got with Now That I've Found You ("It was amazing the difference that made"). She hasn't had comparable radio play (or comparable sales, despite gold records for New Favorite and 1997's So Long So Wrong) since. Then again, part of what makes O Brother such a phenomenon is that it's done it all without mainstream-radio play. Sales like that have caused a lot of talk about the pop habits of commercial country radio -- of Garth and McGraw and Shania -- eventually finding their way back to roots music.

But the state of country radio isn't something that 10-time Grammy winner Krauss is overly vexed by. "I'm so out of touch with it," she laughs. "Boy, it would be neat if it did affect it [radio play]. When I do hear stuff on the radio, I think it's too bad all these other forms of traditional music aren't as accessible. That's a drag. All the great Cajun music is worthy of having its own radio station. Of course, I feel the same way about bluegrass. It's a shame."

Not that Krauss isn't a fan of pop and rock. She's professed her love for Lynyrd Skynyrd and AC/DC, and Now That I've Found You included Bad Company's "Oh, Atlanta," the Beatles' "I Will," and the Foundations' 1968 pop hit "Baby, Now That I've Found You" (from the same folks who later brought you "Build Me Up Buttercup"). But Union Station (which she's always insisted be respected as a separate entity) hews to bluegrass arrangements -- the drummerless acoustic string-band blend of fiddles, guitars, banjo, mandolin, and bass that's been the genre's hallmark since the early days of Bill Monroe. Krauss's 1999 solo CD Forget About It was probably her poppiest, with the addition of piano and drums and electric guitars.

In any case, the dividing line between pop and traditional isn't something she deliberates on in her song selection. And mostly, she says, she's not guided by genre or even melody and song structure or by how a song might lie in her voice, but by those stories. "If I like it, if it makes me feel something, that's it." The melody, she says, can always be "messed with" in the arrangements, but the words have to be right. "Sometimes I just love a song and then can't do the words. I'm like, `Oh, I love that,' and then it's like, `Oh well, nah . . . ' " The test of the song is those words and "if I can sing them truthfully."

She talks about her luck in finding great songs, and great songwriters, who tend to be, she says, "kind of in this outside place." By which she means "non-commercial country." One of her favorite songwriters, Robert Lee Castleman, has two new songs on New Favorite, including "Let Me Touch You for Awhile." "Every time I hear one of his songs, I just think, `Oh gosh, that's the most familiar thing I've ever heard, but it's totally unpredictable.' "

The album's title song comes from another member of the O Brother ensemble, and another Nashville outsider, Gillian Welch. Krauss, who is now divorced with a two-and-a-half-year-old son, was at Welch's publisher's office checking out tunes when she went into the next room to feed her baby. " `New Favorite' came on and I yelled, `WHAT IS THAT?! I'VE GOT TO HAVE THAT ONE!' When we rehearsed that, every time that second verse came in, it was just like, `I can't even sing this, it would make me so sad.' " The song is about a lover seeing her old flame with a "new favorite."

Does Krauss ever feel hemmed in by the tradition she's helped reinvigorate, as though she had an obligation to the bluegrass tradition not to stray to far from its folk roots? "I really feel like my obligation is for the band and myself to be true to what we see to do musically. And we've always been that way. I love traditional music, always have and I always will, and I'm sure we'll always be involved in it. But also to be true to what we feel like doing. People grow as they get older, but I don't see myself ever departing from this style of music. We are just true to what our musical desires are."

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Alison Krauss and Union Station play the Orpheum Theatre in Boston this Saturday, April 20, and the "Down from the Mountain" tour on June 30 at Tsongas Arena in Lowell, Massachusetts. Call (617) 931-2000 about both shows.

Issue Date: April 19 - 25, 2002