Like makin' love

Alison Krauss delivers heart and soul

by Charles Taylor

For pop fans, traditional music is what you feel you should listen to instead of what you want to listen to. It's the highest praise I can give Alison Krauss and Union Station that their new album, So Long So Wrong (Rounder), is something I want to listen to.

I'm one of the couple million people who got converted to Krauss with her last album, the felicitously titled compilation Now That I've Found You. The essence of her appeal is that she offers emotional purity without the stuffiness of purists. Her approach -- her clean, crystalline voice, so delicate it seems to waft to you on a whisper, so sturdy it's like a crocus that makes itself visible on an early spring day, before the chill of winter is gone from the air -- makes no place for the overstatement of the melodrama queens who currently dominate pop balladry. (Watching the horror that is Celine Dion on the Grammys a few weeks back, I was reminded of how, during the '76 Olympics, Nadia Comenici would emotionlessly execute a perfect routine, then flash a mechanical smile at the cameras.) And the quiet emotional fullness of Krauss's delivery -- which comes out of an almost gospel-like sense of acceptance and serenity, even when she's singing about emotional devastation -- obliterates the colorless quality of singers who have sometimes tread the same territory. (To put it another way: you can get rid of those old Linda Ronstadt records now.)

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Alison Krauss
Krauss, Rounder, and radio
Alison Krauss discography

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What Krauss and Union Station play is, technically, bluegrass. But bluegrass to them seems more a matter of instinct and feeling, of bringing a sensibility steeped in that music to bear on what wouldn't normally be classified as bluegrass. That's why, on Now That I've Found You, covers of the Beatles, Bad Company, and the Foundations didn't sound out of place next to more-traditional numbers like "Teardrops Will Kiss the Morning Dew" and the gospel cut "In the Palm of Your Hand." And it's why, on So Long So Wrong, you can imagine numbers like "Looking in the Eyes of Love" and "I Can Let Go Now" turning into schlockfests for any MOR singer who got her mitts on them, rather than being the simple, almost refined statements that they are.

Throughout So Long So Wrong, Krauss sings in a breathier register than we're used to hearing from her. I confess to missing the more forthright, slightly trilling quality of a number like "Every Time You Say Goodbye" or "Two Highways," on which she recalled the young Dolly Parton. The new album seems calculated to capitalize on the success of Now That I've Found You. It pushes Krauss as a ballad singer, and it's the closest she's come to a straight pop sensibility. In interviews, she has acknowledged that she's sometimes felt as if she were playacting at the adult emotions of the songs she did. You sure can't tell that from her delivery, and she sounds almost startlingly at home with the songs of heartache and doubt here. The road song "Find My Way Back to My Heart" can be heard as an acknowledgment of that. "It Doesn't Matter" goes even farther. The stillness, almost the willfulness, with which she delivers the lines "It doesn't matter what I want/It doesn't matter what I need" casts a chill over the song that doesn't abate. It's a feeling emphasized in the background by the dusting of Adam Steffey's mandolin, which sounds like a warm memory fading into nothingness. The sometimes unnerving sense of acceptance that permeates So Long So Wrong achieves a spirituality in the gospel closer "There Is a Reason," a simple declaration of trying to believe in the face of doubt. Krauss's fiddle playing is perhaps more virtuoso on other numbers, but the sound she gets to begin this song -- something like a dusky reverb -- is wonderful.

By now, if you strung together all the stories of how Krauss has been pursued by major labels and how she keeps refusing them, you'd probably have something like a Road Runner cartoon on an epic scale. Part of her plan to avoid being smoothed over into a conventional pop star is maintaining an identity as part of Union Station. That's probably a smart move. If I were her, I wouldn't be eager to separate from a group of musicians who follow her lead so instinctively. But I have to confess that, though Union Station can provide her with lovely harmony vocals (and banjo player/guitarist Ron Block also contributes as a songwriter), their lead vocals, though serviceable and pleasant, just don't cut it after you've been listening to Krauss.

This past fall, I caught Krauss on a segment of the Grand Ole Opry hosted by Lorrie Morgan. The reigning diva of the Victoria's Secret school of country music, Morgan came out leading the applause after Krauss had stunned the tourists and snapshot takers to a hush and, tongue-tied and shaking her head in amazement, fumbled to the audience, "What can I say?" I hope, in their bid for a bigger share of the pop and country market, Krauss and Union Station continue to expand their definition of bluegrass and don't simply settle for ballads (I'd love her to exercise her Bad Company jones on "Feel like Makin' Love"). But no one's likely to start confusing Krauss with the rest of what's out there.

Alison Krauss and Union Station play Sanders Theatre on May 5. Call 496-2222.

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Alison Krauss
Krauss, Rounder, and radio
Alison Krauss discography

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