Alison Krauss’ most recent triumph, the certified-platinum
Raising Sand, her 2007 collaboration with Robert Plant and producer
T Bone Burnett, notched up a total of six Grammy® Awards, including
Album of the Year and Song of the Year, bringing her unsurpassed total
to 26. That mesmerizing modern-day masterpiece sets the stage for
another stunner: Paper Airplane, the artist’s first album of
all-new recordings in partnership with her remarkably skillful and
renowned band Union Station since 2004’s Lonely Runs Both Ways.
The players -- Jerry Douglas (Dobro, lap steel, vocals), Dan Tyminski
(guitar, mandolin, lead vocal), Ron Block (banjo, guitar) and Barry
Bales (bass, vocals), with Krauss on lead vocal and fiddle -- are five
distinct personalities who come together to form something truly unique
as a band. Each bandmate has his own bustling career, but when these
singular musicians come together, they’re an airtight unit devoted to
the process of making music together. Indeed, their connection is so
close and deep that they’ve come to think of each other as family.
Produced by Krauss and Union Station, with studio legend Mike Shipley
engineering and mixing, Paper Airplane contains 11 songs of
poignancy and austere beauty, chosen with the impeccable taste and
unerring intuition that have characterized her entire body of work,
delivered by this world-class unit with an immediacy that goes beyond
mere virtuosity.
Throughout her remarkable career, which spans a quarter century,
though she’s only 39, Krauss has remained grounded and real. Deeply
introspective as an artist, she’s commensurately outgoing and
spontaneous in conversation -- both sides of her character evidencing a
life-embracing humanity. In her work, Krauss has managed to consistently
locate the fertile common ground between traditional modes and topical
themes. On Paper Airplane, she and the band somehow managed to
plumb the depths of Krauss’ own psyche while also capturing the
zeitgeist, so that this portrait of the artist doubles as a portrait of
America as a whole at a crucial moment in its history.
The process that led to Paper Airplane had its own particular
set of circumstances, at one point bringing the sessions to a dead stop
when, for just the second time in her life, Krauss was hammered by a
bout of migraine headaches. “There have been records that were tough to
make, but this one took the cake,” she says with a rueful laugh. “At one
point, Dan said, ‘I don’t really know what to do unless you’re jumping
up and down because you love something or you hate it.’ I make judgments
based on how something makes me feel, and because I wasn’t physically
well, everything was kind of gray and nothing sounded right. So after we
recorded a bunch of things, we took a long break, because it just wasn’t
working.”
For the crucial missing piece, Krauss turned to her longtime go-to
guy, songwriter Robert Lee Castleman. When she called him, Castleman
lamented that he was in a dry spell and feeling uninspired, but he asked
her to come over and sit with him and tell him about what was going on
in her life. When Krauss walked in the door, he told her he had a
melody. “What are you going to do now?” she asked him. “Wait,” he
answered. “It’ll probably be here by midnight.” Krauss stayed just long
enough to make grilled cheese sandwiches and tell him what was going
through her mind. A few hours later, Castleman called. “I got it,” he
said. “What’s it called?” she asked. “’Paper Airplane,’” he answered.
“All I did was encourage him and share what was going on within
myself,” Krauss recalls of that memorable afternoon. “But I can’t take
credit for his gift. I had no hand in writing it -- that was all
Robert.”
Castleman hit the bull’s-eye, evidenced by the fact that “Paper
Airplane” serves as the new album’s title song as well as its opening
track. What did this newly minted song express that was so right in
terms of what she wanted to say?
“It represents a trial -- like a trying time that has an end,” she
explains. “And that’s what everything was to me on this record,
including the Dustbowl tune [the Tyminski-sung “Dustbowl Children,”
written by Peter Rowan]. It’s all about a span of time that’s a trial.
We didn’t pick that as a theme; we found out what the theme was
afterward. I was just following what was appealing, but wasn’t conscious
of what it was that was speaking to me. I don’t have any preconceived
notions; I don’t know till it hits me. ”
Similar friendly persuasion on Krauss’ part yielded the grown-up
lullaby “Lie Awake” from her brother Viktor and lyricist Angel Snow. She
also urged her friend and longtime musical colleague Sidney Cox, of
Louisiana’s Cox Family, to complete the seafaring saga he was working
on, “Bonita and Bill Butler,” about his ancestors’ voyage to America,
which captivated her, even in its unfinished state. She just knew it
would be a natural fit with Tyminski’s muscular, evocative voice.
“Nobody can touch Dan when he’s in his element,” Krauss raves. “He
always jokes, ‘I’m an angry soldier, or I’m an angry farmer.’ I was so
jacked up on this song of Sidney’s, and thankfully, Dan liked it. It’s
beautiful writing, and Dan delivered. I’ve loved his singing forever,
but he went to a whole other place on this record.”
She also selected a pair of classics in Jackson Browne’s “My Opening
Farewell” (from his self-titled 1972 debut album), which she’d learned
from Michael Johnson’s cover version, and Richard Thompson’s “Dimming of
the Day” (originally sung by his then-wife Linda on the couple’s 1975 LP
Pour Down Like Silver).
“I’d first heard ‘Dimming of the Day’ when T Bone Burnett played it
for me three years ago, as we were going through material for Raising
Sand, and I said, ‘Oh, I can’t do that’ -- I just couldn’t go there
at the time. But when we were gathering tunes for this album, I felt
like I could. The funny thing is, I’d been thinking about it, and Robert
Castleman called to tell me he had the most perfect song for me -- it
was ‘Dimming of the Day.’ And then, Jerry [Douglas] kept talking about
this beautiful song he’d heard that we would love, but he couldn’t
remember the name of it. When the band and I sat together and listened
to ‘Dimming of the Day’, Jerry goes, ‘That’s the song!’ We thought it
fit with the rest of the way things were on this record. ” Does it ever.
“The day we cut the song in the studio, and hit the line, ‘When all
my will is gone you hold me sway,’ I fell apart and had to stop. I said,
‘It’s so sad.’ And everybody was so sweet -- I thought they were gonna
laugh and rip me apart. There was this big, long silence, and Barry
says, ‘Well, that’s what you get for havin’ a girl in the band.’”
In the end, making Paper Airplane was a revelatory experience
for the band. “Whatever formula we thought there was doesn’t
exist,” Krauss acknowledges. “It disappeared, especially this last time
out. You can’t trust your method; you can’t rely on a method. The only
thing you can do is record things that move you -- that have a
connection with you -- and to represent yourself truthfully. Things have
to be true that I sing or I can’t do it. Whether I write them or not,
they have to be true for me to say it, and for the guys to play it. The
only recipe is if it feels true, and true may be incredibly sad.
But that’s the part that feels good, because it’s truthful. It
might not be true for anybody else, but it is for us. That’s the
recipe.”
“I feel like this is the best environment for me,” she says of
working within the context of the band. Proof of that simple but telling
statement resonates from every note of this musically exquisite,
emotionally charged and, above all, utterly truthful album.
