Listen to the album Robert Plant Raise the Roof

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Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ 2007 collaborative album Raising Sand remains, nearly a decade and a half after its release, a landmark record in roots music. The LP earned Plant, of Led Zeppelin fame, and reigning bluegrass queen Krauss five Grammys at the 2009 ceremony, including the coveted Album of the Year trophy, among many other accolades. The album also offered a new vision for how artists could work within an already nebulous genre, with the two recording favorite songs new and old for a collection that still sounds timeless.

Plant and Krauss reconvene on Raise the Roof, seeming, somehow, to pick right back up where they left off. Still present are the pair’s intimacy, their contrasting but complementary vocal styles, and, notably, the gentle hand of producer T Bone Burnett, who also helmed Raising Sand. While much remains the same, Raise the Roof is a decidedly larger affair than its predecessor, even in its quieter moments, thanks likely to each artist’s growth via work with other projects (Band of Joy and Sensational Space Shifters for Plant; longtime band Union Station for Krauss) in the intervening decade-plus. Covered artists include Calexico (“Quattro [World Drifts In]”), Allen Toussaint (“Trouble With My Lover”), and Merle Haggard (“Going Where the Lonely Go”), with the album’s tracklist revealing a catholic breadth of influences. The duo is backed by some of Nashville’s finest players, including guitarists Buddy Miller and Bill Frisell.

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The druid Robert Plant and the country princess Alison Krauss first crossed paths in 2004 at a tribute concert to folk-bluesman Leadbelly. Two years later, they recorded their first album as a duo, Raising Sand, a precious gem of American music in the broadest sense, elevated by a repertoire based around selected covers with T Bone Burnett producing. This sequel arrives thirteen years on, but it is as if no time had passed at all. Right from the get go this second album boasts more or less the same hard core of musicians as the first: Marc Ribot on guitar, Jay Bellerose on drums, Dennis Crouch on double bass and of course old T Bone on the console. Except for one song, this is still a record made up of covers, fished out of the treasure chest of American music, from Don Everly and Hank Williams to Calexico, Allen Toussaint, Bert Jansch and Merle Haggard plus some others who are much more obscure. Take, for example, Randy Weeks or indeed Mrs Geeshie Wiley, whose Last Kind Words Blues is daringly covered here: one of the most sacred, mysterious and untouchable pieces of old-time blues. And they do it very well, without imitation, by taking it to an Appalachian place, somewhere "High and lonesome", as the only song on the album written by Robert Plant is titled. Another example is the last track on the album, Lucinda Williams' You Can't Rule Me, which they make sound like a Howlin' Wolf cover. Without exception, this record is a great moment of musical alchemy, a reunion of folk ghosts who would rather share a beer in the shadows, than go around spooking people. Robert Plant, Alison Krauss and the team never overdo it: their approach to this legendary American music is one of the utmost simplicity and freedom. And that's only natural: they are a part of that tradition themselves. © Stéphane Deschamps/Qobuz

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Quattro (World Drifts In)