Tag: Michael McDonald

An AKUS Primer: Alison Krauss and (Mostly) Union Station for Beginners

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

While you know better, there’s a wide swath of the music-listening world in which Alison Krauss is best known as former Led Zeppelin golden god Robert Plant’s duet partner. Yet, Krauss has had a wholly remarkable career going back nearly 40 years, in which she has exhibited profound collaborative instincts and abilities.

On the occasion of the release of Arcadia, her first album with Union Station in 14 years (as well as a reunion with the founders of her former longtime label, Rounder Records), we look back at some of Krauss’ career highlights in and out of Union Station.

“Cluck Old Hen” (traditional; 1992-2007)

We begin with a literal oldie, “Cluck Old Hen,” from the pre-bluegrass era, which demonstrates two things – that Alison Krauss has always revered the history, roots, and traditions of bluegrass; and that Union Station is one incredible ensemble. Recordings of this Appalachian fiddle tune go back more than a century, to country music forefather Fiddlin’ John Carson in the 1920s.

Krauss first released an instrumental version of the tune on 1992’s Everytime You Say Goodbye (her second LP with Union Station), and won a GRAMMY with the onstage version on 2002’s AKUS album, Live. But feast your ears and eyes on this 2007 performance at the Grand Ole Opry, with a pre-teen Sierra Hull sitting in.

1992 studio version: 

2002 live version:

“When You Say Nothing At All” (Paul Overstreet & Don Schlitz; 1994)

After a decade of steadily accelerating momentum, Krauss had her big commercial breakout with this AKUS cover of the late Keith Whitley’s 1988 country chart-topper. Krauss sang it on 1994’s Keith Whitley: A Tribute Album and it served as centerpiece of her own 1995 album, Now That I’ve Found You: A Collection. It reached No. 3 on the country singles chart and went on to win the Country Music Association’s single of the year plus a GRAMMY Award. You can hear why.

Whitley’s version:

“I Can Let Go Now” (Michael McDonald; 1997)

For any interpretive singer, the choice of material is key. And if the singer in question has Krauss’ range and chops and vision, some truly unlikely alchemy is possible. Among the best examples from the AKUS repertoire is “I Can Let Go Now,” a deep cut on Doobie Brothers frontman Michael McDonald’s 1982 solo album, If That’s What It Takes. Another amazing Krauss vocal in a career full of them.

McDonald’s version:

“Man of Constant Sorrow” (traditional; 2000-2002)

Before O Brother, Where Art Thou?, you wouldn’t have called singer-guitarist Dan Tyminski the unheralded “secret weapon” of AKUS. Nevertheless, he didn’t become a star in his own right until serving as movie star George Clooney’s singing voice in the Coen Brothers loopy, Odyssey-inspired farce. “Man of Constant Sorrow” was the hit in the movie and also on the radio, launching Tyminski to solo stardom.

Resonator guitarist Jerry Douglas especially shines on this version from 2002’s Live, recorded in Louisville – you can just tell everyone in the crowd was waiting for the “I bid farewell to old Kentucky” line so they could go nuts. Tyminski would have another unlikely hit in 2013, singing on Swedish deejay Avicii’s “Hey Brother.”

O Brother version:

“New Favorite” (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings; 2001)

Kraus sang on the GRAMMY-winning O Brother soundtrack, too, alongside Gillian Welch. It will come as no surprise that the Welch/Rawlings catalog has been a recurrent favorite song source for her. One of Krauss’ best Welch/Rawlings selections is “New Favorite,” title track of the thrice-GRAMMY-winning 2001 AKUS album. Though it’s edited out in this video, the album-closing version concluded with a rare in-the-studio instrumental flub, followed by sheepish laughter to end the record. Perhaps the AKUS crew is human after all?

“Borderline” (Sidney & Suzanne Cox; 2004)

The story goes that the first time Krauss was on the summer touring circuit, she’d go around knocking on camper doors at bluegrass festivals to ask whoever answered, “Are you the Cox Family?” Once she found them, she didn’t let go, and the Coxes became some of the best of her collaborators and song providers. Along with producing their albums, Krauss covered Cox compositions frequently; “Borderline” appeared on 2004’s Lonely Runs Both Ways, another triple GRAMMY winner.

“Big Log” (Robert Plant, Robbie Blunt, Jezz Woodroffe; 2004)

When Krauss first sang with Robert Plant at a Leadbelly tribute concert in November 2004, it seemed like the unlikeliest of pairings. But here’s proof that they had more in common than you’d expect, with Krauss covering a solo Plant hit from 1983. She sang “Big Log” on her brother Victor Krauss’ album, Far From Enough, which was released earlier in 2004.

This video pairs the Krauss siblings’ version with Plant’s original 1983 video, directed by Storm Thorgerson.

“Dimming of the Day” (Richard & Linda Thompson; 2011)

Fairport Convention guitarist Richard Thompson is one of the finest instrumentalists of his generation as well as a brilliant songwriter, especially with his former wife and collaborator Linda Thompson. This stately, bittersweet love song dates back to their 1975 duo LP, Pour Down Like Silver, and Linda sets the bar high with a stoic yet emotional vocal. Krauss more than lives up to it on the 2011 AKUS album Paper Airplane, which also offers another great showcase for resonator guitarist Douglas.

Richard & Linda’s version: 

“Your Long Journey” (Doc & Rosa Lee Watson; 2007)

Krauss isn’t just a spectacular lead vocalist, but also an amazing harmony singer, one of the few who can hold a candle to Emmylou Harris. Retitled from the Doc/Rosa Lee Watson original, “Your Lone Journey,” this closing track to 2007’s grand-slam GRAMMY winner Raising Sand has Krauss’ most emotional vocal harmonies with Plant on either of their two albums together.

Doc Watson’s version:

“Heaven’s Bright Shore” (A. Kennedy; 1989, 2015)

All that, and she’s an incredible backup vocalist to boot. “Heaven’s Bright Shore” is a gospel song Krauss first recorded as a teenager on 1989’s Two Highways, her first album billed as Alison Krauss & Union Station (and also her first to receive a GRAMMY nomination). It’s great, but an even better version is this 2015 recording in which she’s backing up bluegrass patriarch Ralph Stanley alongside Judy Marshall.

AKUS version: 

“The Captain’s Daughter” (Johnny Cash & Robert Lee Castleman; 2018)

The late great Johnny Cash left behind a lot of writings after he died in 2003, some of which were turned into songs for the 2018 tribute album, Forever Words: The Music. None of his songs ever had it so good as “The Captain’s Daughter.” This superlative AKUS version fits Cash’s words like a glove.

Continue exploring our Artist of the Month coverage of Alison Krauss & Union Station here.

Alison Krauss & Union Station figure prominently in David Menconi’s book, Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music, published in 2023 by University of North Carolina Press and featuring a foreword by Robert Plant.

Photo Credit: Randee St. Nicholas

The Herculean Story Behind Andrea Zonn and John Cowan Becoming The HercuLeons

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Andrea Zonn and John Cowan have been among the hardest-working musicians around Nashville for the past few decades. Zonn has done tons of sessions both for her violin and vocal prowess as well as touring with superstars like Vince Gill, Lyle Lovett, and James Taylor. Cowan, a longtime member of the legendary New Grass Revival, also was a founding member of the country-rock supergroup The Sky Kings, has done solo projects, and currently tours as the Doobie Brothers’ bassist. However, they only really started playing together due to the pandemic. Their collaboration resulted in a band called The HercuLeons, whose debut album Andrea Zonn & John Cowan Are The HercuLeons arrives March 21 on True Lonesome Records.

Darrell Scott, Tom Britt, Greg Morrow, Abraham Parker, Gary Prim, and Reese Wynans represent the primary HercuLeons on the album, while Billy Payne, Michael McDonald, Jonell Mosser, John Hall, and John McFee number among the special guests.

Zonn and Cowan spoke separately to BGS for our feature interview all about their unique collaboration, becoming a band, and the debut album.

When did you two first meet?

Andrea Zonn: I moved to Nashville in 1986 and John I think got here two, three, four years before that. I was already a fan of his, but we met and our paths crossed over the years. Then at some point we got called to sing on a session together. I just love singing with him. We became friends and have been great friends. He’s like a brother to me, actually.

John Cowan: Our lives have been continually entwined because of our musical interests, our mutual respect for each other, and because we would get hired to do backing vocal sessions.

How did this particular collaboration come to be?

JC: Right during the pandemic, Andrea and I had gotten solicited to play on a custom project. It was like, “We’ve got three songs for you.” And we’re like, “Okay.” Well, it turns out they had like nine songs for us and we basically just went from the top of the list all the way to the bottom; we were there like 10 hours.

AZ: Then I was just about to call him on my way home, when he called me and we were both about to say the same thing, which is “God, I love singing with you.” We just decided to sort of become each other’s creative bubble during the pandemic. We were thinking we would do something sort of bluegrass-y with [mandolinist] Ashby Frank, [guitarist] Seth Taylor, and [banjo player] Matt Menefee, which was a blast. So, we did a couple of Facebook Live concerts, which is hysterical because we were playing just to the camera.

JC: These kind of young guns guys – Ashby and Seth and Matt – they’re at that time of their lives where they’re just running full speed. They’re just so impassioned and so full of music that you really can’t get somebody like that to commit to, “Hey, let’s be in a band.” By the time we got around to making this record, the personnel had just switched to basically me and Andrea and then we chose the band that we wanted to make the record with.

How did the record come about?

JC: It happened pretty organically. We were talking about making this record. We weren’t even as far as who’s playing on it, or who’s producing or what it is. But I was driving home from my sister’s house in Indiana back to Nashville one day and I heard Claire Lynch doing this song called “Barbed Wire Boys” and I literally pulled my car over because I thought to myself: “Am I hearing what I [think I’m hearing]?” The words were so unbelievably well-written. It was just stunning. I played it for Andrea and I said, “What do you think of this song? Are you just as stunned by the words as I am?” She said, “Absolutely!”

AZ: It just felt like such a timely message in this song, which is that there’s this generation of strong, stoic men who have this really soft underbelly. It feels like there’s not a place for that right now and there’s a real wistful longing for this gentle strength. We were listening to the song going, “What could we do with this?” We were just looking at it as this single standalone thing. Let’s just record this because we love it. We’ve got time on our hands. And the idea just kept growing. It’s like, “Let’s just figure out a way to make a record like this.” Also, with the pandemic [it was] a weird time to make long-term plans

Wendy Waldman produced the album – how did she get involved?

JC: We got a hold of Wendy Waldman, who’s one of my oldest friends and produced many things I’m involved with. Andrea and I made a vocal guitar demo and sent it to her.

AZ: We decided we wanted to slow down [the song], break it down, and make it more of what Wendy calls, “The prairie orchestra sort of thing.”

JC: She worked on it for us – it’s like she went away in a little hobbit in a village of stuff, she came back to us, and she’d written the most beautiful layers of mandolins and acoustic guitar tuned down low.

AZ: She’s like a shaman the way she creates. It’s like you just see glowing aura is coming out of her when she’s in that space.

The idea to do an album grew from there?

JC: That was the beginning of the record. We had that song and we started pursuing it and it would be about sharing tracks and files back and forth from California, which is where Wendy lived, and that was going swimmingly well.

AZ: Exactly. It was like, “Let’s put something beautiful in the world, because I feel like that’s our responsibility as artists.” Especially during these times we’re living in are so full of devastation and difficult things and people need healing. They need beauty. They need that balance. And so that’s where we come in. So, it just started as just this yearning to create something beautiful. And then it was just so much fun, and the chemistry was there.

The album features only 11 songs and those are mainly covers. Was it hard to decide what songs to record?

AZ: It was brutal actually picking songs, because there are so many beautiful and great songs and we weren’t really all that concerned with where the genre markers are. We just were like, let’s just do stuff we love. We’ve just been feeling our way through it. Things that we really felt like we could sing well together were sort of a consideration. It was such an organic process, and it was not a quick process.

JC: I think we got up to 30 songs that we wanted to have a stab at. We kept culling it down. So, this bushel of songs started to reveal itself to us. We opened it up a lot [like] a basket of fruit and you could see which one was going to make it and which ones might get a little too ripe.

One of the things that immediately stands out is the amazing way you two sing together

AZ: We have a lot of the same influences. You know, I call him “The Powerhouse” and I’m sort of a “Powder Puff” so [we] complement each other. He’s just so intuitive and such a great musician, such a beautiful sense of phrasing, and it’s just very easy to fall into place with him

JC: We know each other’s voice, so there’s some kind of internal resonance that’s going on there that you can’t see or feel or touch… You can’t necessarily write it out on a piece of paper. When two singers sing together like that it’s like Baez and Dylan.

The music is remarkably diverse – a vibrant mix of rock, soul, blues, country, funk, and bluegrass – but the album holds a real cohesiveness. There’s a sense of humanism and empathy that flows through the songs you picked.

JC: That’s just who we are. Andrea and I are the same. We’re the perennial man looking for a spirit greater than all of us to bond us to human beings in the world.

That seems to be spotlighted using your single “Face of Appalachia” (an old Lowell George/John Sebastian tune that Valerie Carter had on her 1977 debut album) to raise awareness for victims of Hurricane Helene. It’s a song that has many connections with both of you, right?

JC: Both Andrea and I became or were friends with Valerie before she passed a couple of years, so there’s a huge emotional connection for both of us.

AZ: We just love the song and we wanted to kind of do our little spin on it. Then when the hurricane hit, it’s like we all felt so powerless to help, so we wanted to raise awareness and direct people to organizations that are actually on the ground doing good work. I mean, John and I love the people, the region, the music that comes from there. It’s just such a meaningful place, you know, and your heart just breaks for what people are going through.

If you had to choose a song that’s a good entry point for listeners, what would it be?

AZ: You have to listen to the whole thing. You just have to suck it up and suffer through it, it’s only 11 songs! “Straight Up” would get their attention. Let’s say that it’s short and sweet and it’s just full of a lot of what we do, except for the slow pretty stuff and there’s a great message in that song.

JC: I might say “Face of Appalachia,” because there are two beautiful lead vocals on there, but they don’t appear to be lead vocals. They just appear as these two people singing together. … There’s so much about that track. How the words fit so well with the arrangement. It has shadows and light as well, but a lot of pathos.

The Gregory Porter song we do called “Take Me to the Alley,” I just think it’s a staggering song. It’s basically talking about how people are lining up all these shining things in front of their houses waiting for God to return and then he shows up and he’s like, “I don’t want to see any of this, take me to the alley, take me where the desperate ones are.”

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the HercuLeons.

With His Son and Special Guests, David Crosby Finds His Way on ‘For Free’

Posted on by Editor

“I think I found my way.”

When a guy about to turn 80 sings that line, you take note. When that guy is David Crosby, who in fact turns that age on August 14… well…

“I don’t know if I would have sung it at any other time in my life,” Crosby says in a Zoom chat from his home north of Santa Barbara, California, where he lives with Jan Dance, his wife of 34 years.

But sing it he does, in the song “I Think I,” a highlight of his new album, For Free. With this, his fifth album in seven years (after just three solo albums in the earlier part of his career), he comes to his 80th in a remarkable creative run. It’s a strong collection featuring the fruits of several creative collaborations, mostly with his son, James Raymond. Among the guests are Michael McDonald on the shining opener “River Rise,” Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen on the jazzy, dark “Rodriguez For a Night” and Sarah Jarosz, with whom he duets on a gorgeously spare version of the Joni Mitchell song that gives the album its title.

It’s that line from “I Think I,” though, that speaks most profoundly to the state of his life. If you know much about that life, you understand. And you might greet those words with a sigh of relief. He certainly does.

“I do feel happy now,” he says. “The thing I love about the song the most is that it’s up. It’s, you know, happy sounding. Normally I record tortured ballads that go on for days. ‘The dog died’ or ‘my truck broke down.’ This is up and happy and positive and it just captures that mood that’s around. That’s a blessing for me. That’s a great thing.”

The life leading to this moment has been well-documented and much discussed. Most significantly, Crosby created some of the most bracing, beloved, and enduring American music of the past 60 years, first as a founding member of folk-rock pioneers the Byrds and then in the various partnerships with Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and/or Neil Young. Along with the essential, indelible songs CSN(&Y) gave us, there was much discord and discontent and it finally blew up, apparently for good, in 2014, sparked in part by some unfortunate remarks Crosby made regarding Young’s personal life. And Crosby’s history is marked by his years of drug addiction and a consequent prison term and liver transplant — and, thankfully, recovery. This was all covered in Remember My Name, the unflinching 2019 documentary that brought him to some painfully heartfelt reckonings.

For better or worse, Crosby’s legacy is tangled up with groups and partnerships. Asked to untangle it, he turns thoughtful.

“A lot of the musical complexity and strangeness comes from me loving jazz and world music,” he says. “I mean, I like a lot of different kinds of music, man. I like bluegrass. I like blues. I like classical music. And that has influenced me very strongly. Particularly jazz, and particularly jazz keyboard players, McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, people like that. They have had a very strong influence because they played those real dense, big tone, cluster kinds of chords. And I couldn’t do them in regular tuning on the guitar. That’s what made me start re-tuning the guitar into other shapes so that I could get those kind of chords. So the jazz thing really did stack me up differently.”

That influence has been a constant facet, all the way back to the Byrds (“Everybody’s Been Burned” is almost a template for the folk-jazz explorations Tim Buckley would make) and CSN (“Guinnevere,” with its floating harmonics, was covered by both Miles Davis and jazz flute player Herbie Mann).

These days Crosby is not focused on the past, although with last year’s 50th anniversary of the CSN&Y album Déjà Vu and the expanded deluxe reissue, he’s had to do more of that than he’d like.

“I always prefer when it comes to talking about me, I like it to be somebody else doing the talking,” he says.

He’s not focused on the future, either. He says that he likely won’t tour again and with tendonitis in both hands, he expects he won’t be able to play guitar anymore within a year — a great shame as his guitar playing, with its intricate jazz voicings and inventive tunings, is as stunning as his singing, if not as widely recognized.

He’s certainly not looking forward to his birthday.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” he insists. “Birthdays are not happy when you get old. No, no, no, no, no, no! We don’t celebrate. We mourn those.”

Yet he’s utterly bubbly celebrating the new album, as well as the four leading up to it, by far his most prolific stretch in terms of making and releasing his own music. It’s not often that we can say that about someone’s 70s, let alone someone with such a vaunted career packed with songs and albums cherished dearly by millions.

“Isn’t that weird?” he says. “It’s just completely bass-ackwards. But there you go.”

To what does he attribute this?

“I got out of CSN,” he says, never one to mince words. “It was, obviously, a wonderful band and we did a lot of really great stuff. But when it when sour, it went really sour. And it went sour very fast.”

It was rough, but the silver lining shines brightly.

“I don’t make anywhere near as much money,” he says. “But I’m making good music. And that’s kind of what they put me here to do, I think.”

Cue the title song, Mitchell’s loving portrait of a street musician playing for the pure joy of it. This is the third straight Crosby album to include a Mitchell song, following “Amelia” on 2017’s Sky Trails and “Woodstock” closing 2018’s Here If You Listen. Crosby, who was an early champion (and romantic partner) of Mitchell’s, producing her debut album, Song to a Seagull, sang “For Free” on the Byrds’ 1973 reunion album. Now, though, it has a deeper resonance, reconnecting to the essence of music-making. Rather than an observer, he’s the guy in the song.

“Yep,” he says. “There I am standing on the corner. It’s squarely, smack dab in the middle of who I wanted to be, as me. I love what it says. Putting it on as the title track is also taking a little dig at the streamers. Because it is for free, man. They don’t pay us.”

Crosby had become a fan of Sarah Jarosz via I’m With Her, the group in which she’s teamed with Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins. And he loved Jarosz’s 2020 album, World on the Ground.

“I called her up and said, ‘Listen, Sarah. Can we do something together?’” he says. “And she said, ‘Sure! What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I just want to sing with you.’ And she said, ‘Oh, you sweetheart.’”

Crosby quickly suggested “For Free.”

“I’ve sung it a bunch, and I’m confident with it,” he told her. “She said, ‘Oh, I love that song.’ So I sent her a tape of it that I went in to the studio and cut. James made this incredible piano track for it. Just beautiful. Sarah sent it back with her vocal on it, and it completely blew my mind out of my ear. It was unbelievably good.”

Clearly, Crosby still craves collaboration. A sense of joyful purpose is unmistakable in his voice and in the voices and playing of those who helped him make the album. Foremost is James Raymond, the producer-composer-keyboardist who has been at Crosby’s musical side regularly since 1997, five years after learning that Crosby was his biological father. His talents have been showcased not only in his father’s solo projects, but also for years with CSN as a full-time member of the touring band, and in the jazzy group Crosby and Raymond fronted off and on with bassist Jeff Pevar, cheekily branded CPR. On For Free, Raymond wrote or co-wrote seven of its 10 songs, including “I Think I” and the somberly beautiful closer, “I Won’t Stay for Long,” inspired by Marcel Camus’ haunting 1959 film Black Orpheus.

“It’s wild to watch,” Crosby beamed. “He’s gotten to be as good a writer as I am, or better. ‘I Won’t Stay for Long’ is the best song on the record. It makes me cry. It just freaks me out.”

Guitarist Dean Parks adds color to “Rodriguez” and “Shot at Me,” the latter a powerful ballad which he co-wrote from Crosby’s words inspired by an encounter with an Afghanistan war veteran, who told him of the most human costs of war. It’s a strong addition to Crosby’s deep catalog of incisive, biting topical songs.

“I seem to run into those guys and talk to them,” Crosby says. “I ran into this guy at the airport and was drinking in the bar and he looked really bummed, really sad. So sure, I talked to him.”

As for not being able to tour anymore, Crosby is sad but sanguine.

“Singing live is the great joy of my life,” he says. “My family and singing live. That’s the top of my world, you know?”

Even if the shows stop, the music won’t, right?

“I don’t know,” he says. “I can still sing. That’s why we’re doing the records, because we love making music. Right? They obviously don’t pay us for them, so that’s the only reason there could be. We’re not trying to win the ratings war or something. We’re just singing exactly the music that really rings our bell and makes our heart sing. And there you go. And if people like it, great. And if they don’t like it, great, we don’t care.”

Photo credit: Anna Webber.
Album cover painting by Joan Baez.