Robert Plant & Alison Krauss Raise the Roof released

Raising the Roof Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Released: November 19, 2021 Peak: 7 US, 3 CW, 5 UK, 16 CN, 18 AU Sales (in millions): -- US, -- UK, -- world (includes US and UK) Genre: Americana

Tracks: Song Title (Writers) [time] (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to singles charts. Quattro (World Drifts In) [4:33] The Price of Love [4:50] Go Your Way [5:07] Trouble with My Lover [4:03] Searching for My Love [4:03] Can’t Let Go [3:41] (8/12/21, 8 AA) It Don’t Bother Me [5:06] (11/4/21) You Led Me to the Wrong [4:17] Last Kind Words Blues [4:06] High and Lonesome [4:33] (10/7/21) Going Where the Lonely Go [4:10] Somebody Was Watching Over Me [5:02] Total Running Time: 53:32 The Players: Robert Plant (vocals) Alison Krauss (vocals) T-Bone Burnett (producer) Marc Ribot, David Hidalgo, Bill Frisell, Buddy Miller (guitar) Russ Pahl (pedal steel guitar) Dennis Crouch, Viktor Krauss (bass) Jay Bellerose (drums)

Rating: 3.559 out of 5.00 (average of 10 ratings) Quotable: “Matches [Raising Sand] every step of the way” – Ultimate Classic Rock

About the Album: 14 years ago Led Zeppelin’s golden God Robert Plant teamed up for an unlikely pairing with bluegrass singer Alison Krauss. However, “has pretty much made a second career rewriting and rewiring his past.” UCR He “packed away his hard-rock tendencies and dived deeper into Americana, blues, and world music.” UCR Plant and Krauss first met a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame tribute concert to Lead Belly in 2004 when they teamed up to sing “Black Girl.” Krauss told Rolling Stone in 2008 that, “It wasn’t the right tune to make any judgments about how we would really sound…[But later] Robert talked about driving through the mountains, listening to Ralph Stanley. After minutes, I got who he was, why he would be interested in me.” RS The pair teamed up with producer T-Bone Burnett in Nashville in 2006 to record an album, tackling obscure songs with an Americana vibe. The rest of the world was interested as well. The resulting album, Raising Sand, reached #2, sold more than a million copies, and won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Their new album, Raise the Roof, “matches it every step of the way.” UCR Despite the fact that “their backgrounds and record collections rarely intersect…their mutual respect and musical openness…made their collaborations a perfect blending of two seemingly disparate worlds.” UCR The two return with Burnett back as producer for another collection “filled with folk, country, and blues covers” UCR and the “gauzy, serene harmonies that they honed on Raising Sand.” SL The album features covers of songs by Merle Haggard (Going Where the Lonely Go), Allen Toussaint, the Everly Brothers (The Price of Love), and Scottish folk singer Bert Jansch (It Don’t Bother Me). There’s also lesser-known fare such as an obscure song from singer-songwriter Maria Muldaur (Somebody Was Watching Over Me) and the “gentle folk song Go Your Way” UCR originally by Anne Briggs. “The oldest song covered here, Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley’s Last Kind Words Blues, was originally released in 1930. It’s haunting not only for its tragic lyrics, but also because it illuminates just how little is known today about the pioneers of rock and Americana.” SL They also cover “21st-century alt-country” UCR with Calexico’s Quattro (World Drifts In). The song introduces the “broadest thematic scope of all the songs on Raise the Roof, with lyrics about loneliness and moral disorientation.” SL The song also showcases how “Plant’s deep growl [and] Krauss’ sugarcoated higher register meet somewhere in the middle.” UCR “Burnett’s dry and occasionally brittle production complements the tasteful arrangements…Open-aired empty spaces…are almost another instrument here.” UCR Searchin for My Love “is a welcome change of pace due, in part, to Plant and Krauss’s retention of the Bobby Moore original’s Motown-style backing vocals. While the ’60s soul style might have clashed with the cover’s country guitars, Plant’s gravelly vocals and Krauss’s precise harmonies imbue the song with a tender beauty.” SL Mixed amongst the covers is one original tune, High and Lonesome, “a moody highlight,” UCR which was written by Plant and Burnett. The lead single, Can’t Let Go is a cover of a Lucinda Williams song from her acclaimed 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

Resources and Related Links: DMDB encyclopedia entry for Robert Plant DMDB encyclopedia entry for Alison Krauss RS Rolling Stone (8/12/2021). “Robert Plant and Alison Krauss Reunite for New LP ‘Raise the Roof’” by Andy Greene SL Slant (11/15/2021). “Review: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s Raise the Roof Honors Shared Music History” by Eric Mason UCR UltimateClassicRock.com (11/16/2021). “Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, ‘Raise the Roof’: Album Review” by Michael Gallucci WK Wikipedia Other Related DMDB Pages: First posted 11/19/2021; last updated 11/30/2021.

Lucinda Williams Car Wheels on a Gravel Road released

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road Lucinda Williams

Released: June 30, 1998 Peak: 65 US, -- UK, -- CN, 69 AU Sales (in millions): 0.81 US, 0.06 UK, 0.87 world (includes US and UK) Genre: folk/country

Tracks: Song title (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to charts. Right in Time (1998, --) Car Wheels on a Gravel Road 2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten Drunken Angel Concrete and Barbed Wire Lake Charles Can't Let Go (12/5/98, 14 AA) I Lost It Metal Firecracker Greenville Still I Long for Your Kiss Joy Jackson Total Running Time: 51:40

Rating: 4.323 out of 5.00 (average of 25 ratings) Quotable: Car Wheels “stands out as a hallmark of hard-worn Americana, a Southern swirl of country, blues, folk, and rock ‘n’ roll.” – Consequence.net Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

Lucinda Williams’ Early Career Singer/songwriter and guitarist Lucinda Williams was born in 1953 in Louisiana. In 1978, she moved to Jackson, Mississippi to record her first album with Folkway Records. That album, 1979’s Ramblin’ on My Mind and 1980’s Happy Woman Blues, were recorded in a traditional country and blues style. Her self-titled third album took eight years but became celebrated as one of the pivotal records in the Americana movement. It was also her first to chart, reaching #39 on the Billboard album chart. Another four years passed before Lucinda released Sweet Old World, another album that failed to chart. She then took six years before releasing Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. It became the biggest seller of her career, reaching gold status, and also won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Worth the Wait The album took a lot of time for a variety of reasons, namely Lucinda’s “meticulous perfectionism,” AM “scrapped original recordings,” PM “conflicts in the studio,” PM and label difficulties. AM She signed to Rick Rubin’s American label in 1994. Gurf Morlix, who had worked with Williams since the late ‘80s, was set to produce. When Lucinda decided she wasn’t satisfied with the results, she moved to Nashville and started over with Steve Earle. Then she thought the results were too polished and went to Los Angeles and worked with E Street Band member Roy Bittan. TB By the time she handed the tapes over to Rubin for mixing in 1997, he was selling American Recordings to Mercury. That meant Williams had to renegotiate her deal with a new label. TB The result was an album that asks the listener to take time to absorb it. It is “one of those multi-layered albums that opens up with repeated exposure.” RD The album received “pretty much unanimous critical praise” TB and topped many year-end album polls. TB Production Car Wheels “is far and away her most produced album to date, which is something of a mixed blessing. Its surfaces are clean and contemporary, with something in the timbres of the instruments (especially the drums) sounding extremely typical of a late-'90s major-label roots-rock album." AM It means “her sound is punchier and livelier.” AM “The production also throws Williams’ idiosyncratic voice into sharp relief, to the point where it's noticeably separate from the band. As a result, every inflection and slight tonal alteration is captured.” AM The first thing to notice is “her voice, which is wistful, defiant, and wan. Then there are the remarkable arrangements in a variety of American roots idioms.” RD “But most provocative ar the stories Williams tells – she has a winding way of reaching climaxes that are…crushingly sad.” RD The Material and Potential Themes “It’s ultimately the material that matters, and Williams’ songwriting is as captivating as ever." AM "These up-from-Dixie tunes flow so easily, like conversations over a low backyard fence, that it’s hard to believe Williams spent six years obsessing over each chord and syllable." TL "Intentionally or not, the album's common thread seems to be its strongly grounded sense of place – specifically, the Deep South, conveyed through images and numerous references to specific towns. Many songs are set, in some way, in the middle or aftermath of not-quite-resolved love affairs, as Williams meditates on the complexities of human passion. Even her simplest songs have more going on under the surface than their poetic structures might indicate." AM The Album’s Influence “There have been no shortage of Lucinda Williams imitators over the years – artists hoping to nick even an ounce of her grit, grace, and gumption and make it their own.” CQ Car Wheels “laid the roadmap for future generations of assured female singer-songwriters like Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield and Margo Price to write boldly about their interior lives while discarding previously established genre constraints.” PM But there is only one Lucinda Williams, and on Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, she demonstrates why she’s an unrivaled talent.” CQ She “was creating something entirely new; a singular blend of country, folk, blues and rock.” PM Rolling Stone called it an “alt-country masterwork.” 500 It “stands out as a hallmark of hard-worn Americana, a Southern swirl of country, blues, folk, and rock ‘n’ roll.” CQ Lucinda “might not be the most prolific songwriter of the ‘90s, she’s certainly one of the most brilliant.” AM It “was an enduring singer-songwriter classic; a highly melodic, earthy, lived-in set of tunes that spoke to life on the road, desire, disconnect and the terror and ecstasy of love.” PM Consequence.net’s Spencer Dukoff calls her “Americana’s poet laureate” CQ and says “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is a high watermark of the form.” CQ The Songs This is “a riff-laden record with a laundry list of lyrics tailor-made for tattooing on your body, doubling as a roadmap to the soul of a complicated nation.” CQ “The sexy 2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten” CQ “seems at first to be a disjointed string of images from a tavern, and only in the final verse does Williams describe the moment of loss that brought her to this place.” RD Then there’s “the middle-fingers-up kiss-off of Joy, you learn a few things about the record’s central narrator, but there’s one lesson that stands out in particular: You don’t fuck with Lucinda Williams.” CQ “The title track is one of Williams’ best: Over guitars that owe more to the Stones than to the Opry, she tells a story about the rootlessness of American life.” 500 Throughout the album “Williams rocks hard enough to give these troubled songs both dignity and a feeling of release.” 500 "On Can’t Let Go [and] I Lost It she starts with evocative nouns and everyday thoughts…and dramatizes them with indelible country and rock guitar hooks to create a sense of the modern rural South as a place that's sometimes sad, but always seductive.” TL “Can’t Let Go” garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.

Resources: AM AllMusic.com review by Steve Huey CQ Consequence.net (9/12/2022). “The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time” RD Robert Dimery (2006). 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Quintet Publishing Limited: New York, NY. Page 826. PM PasteMagazine.com (6/3/2024). “The 300 Greatest Albums of All Time” 500 Rolling Stone (12/31/2023). “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” TB Thunder Bay (2005). Albums: The Stories Behind 50 Years of Great Recordings. Thunder Bay Press; San Diego, CA. Page 290. TL Time Magazine (11/13/2006). “All-TIME 100 Albums” by Josh Tyrangiel and Alan Light WK Wikipedia Related DMDB Links: First posted 1/26/2011; last updated 12/8/2024.