To listen to a stream of the Raising Sand songs, click here.
Who would have thought that collaboration between one of hard rock’s living legends and the young queen of bluegrass could make such astonishingly beautiful music together? On the surface, the pairing of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss seems like an oddity, but on the authentic endearing Raising Sand, the two sound as if they’ve been building up to this moment their whole lives.
Listeners should approach this record much like the singers did, as in it isn’t so much an album as it is a dance, a courtship, a private dialogue that we’re eavesdropping on. Chaperoning the proceedings is the esteemed producer and musical director T-Bone Burnett. On the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack he guided the fiddle-playing Krauss and a host of vocalists through a several chapters of American roots music; here he takes his artists on an expanded journey, through the old and new, and that includes folk, rockabilly, R&B, country, and blues. (It was blues, in fact, that first brought Plant and Krauss together; in 2004 Plant and Krauss the two sang at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame's tribute concert to blues pioneer Leadbelly.)
With Led Zeppelin, Plant belted out more than his fair share of country-tinged ballads and rockers, but it's a rare treat to hear sit back a spell and harmonize with a versatile singer like Krauss, who proves to be as comfortable with straight-ahead rockabilly (the Everly Brothers' “Gone Gone Gone”), as she is folk (Gene Clark's “Polly Come Home”) or the ever-unclassifiable Tom Waits (“Trampled Rose”). The two pair up nicely on Townes Van Zandt’s gritty but gorgeous “Nothin’,” but they save their finest performances on the ethereal “Please Read the Letter,” a track which Plant and a certain guitar player named Jimmy Page first tackled on Walking into Clarksdale. It was great then, and it’s great now. Some things are just built to last.