Songwriters often note that the concept of turning a song into a hit, at its core, crucially leans on timing: the right singer connecting with the right song at the perfect time. For 27-time Grammy winner, vocalist/fiddler Alison Krauss, that convergence of artist, song and time sparked the reconvening of one of bluegrass music’s most revered groups, the 14-time Grammy winners Alison Krauss & Union Station, who will release their first album in nearly 14 years, the Down the Road Records project, Arcadia, on Friday (March 28).
“We didn’t mean for it to take so long, but it did,” Krauss told Billboard.
Krauss has long had a habit of tucking away songs that she loves, waiting for the right time to record them. Over the years, she’s amassed a collection of those potential recordings, but it wasn’t until she heard the Jeremy Lister song “Looks Like It’s the End of the Road” during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that Krauss felt she’d found that perfect song to kick off a new record with her band Union Station, one that would mark their first since 2011’s Grammy-winning Paper Airplane.
“I had been collecting most of those things since we recorded the last album, so I’d had a lot of them,” Krauss says. “I heard Jeremy Lister’s song and within the first half of the first verse I’m like, ‘There it is.’ A few days later, I texted everybody saying we should get together. I never stopped wanting to [make a new album], but with touring and people recording, there’s such a huge factor, because everybody is scattered.”
The top-caliber talents of each of the band’s members led them to an array of various projects through the years, including studio work, collaborations with other artists and their own solo projects.
In 2017, Krauss released the solo project Windy City. In 2021, she teamed with rock icon Robert Plant for the album Raise the Roof (the sequel to their Grammy-winning Raising Sand project) and a subsequent tour as a duo. Krauss’s Union Station bandmate, dobro player Jerry Douglas has released numerous solo albums, including 2024’s The Set with his own band. Douglas and Union Station bassist Barry Bales also paid tribute to Flatt and Scruggs as part of the group Earl of Leicester. Among other music initiatives, banjoist Ron Block released the 2015 project Hogan’s House of Music. Meanwhile, in 2017, vocalist/mandolin player/guitarist Dan Tyminski released the project Southern Gothic, followed by 2023’s God Fearing Heathen.
“It was great,” Krauss recalls of those first sessions playing with the group and getting acquainted with playing the songs together. “Once we listened to all the material, we started playing all the songs and it’s never a labored process of getting those initial arrangements down for tracking. They are such a great band, cutting the basic tracks that goes really smoothly. So, this is a magical moment for me to be singing my scratches [scratch vocals] over those tracks.”
But as the group began to reconvene, they realized the new project would come with a significant shift in the group’s lineup, when Tyminski revealed he would not be returning to the group, so that he could focus on his solo career.
“Nobody wanted Dan to go, but we respect what he feels called to do,” Krauss says. Tyminski’s influence on the project can still be heard on instrumentation on the album, and he co-wrote the album’s “The Wrong Way” with Robert Lee Castleman.
“He played me that song, it’s got to be 10 years ago at least,” Krauss says. “I’ve had that song a long time and I loved it immediately. I thought it was just beautiful.”
On the new album, Russell Moore, a six-time IBMA male vocalist of the year winner known for his work as part of the seven-time IBMA vocal group of the year-winning group IIIrd Tyme Out, joins Union Station, adding his unmistakable voice alongside Krauss’s ethereal soprano.
“Can you believe his singing?” Krauss gushes. “We all grew up in that same generation and all had the same similar influences of what was happening in bluegrass at the time. We’re all made of the same stuff—we ate the same grass.”
She adds, “So when this came up, we were like, ‘What are we going to do?’ I mentioned Russell and he’s been so respected in this music for decades. The first time I heard him sing, I was 14 and he was 21 — he was playing with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver. He and Dan [Tyminski], of that era, were the guys. I can’t even believe we got to play with Dan for 30 years and now we get to play with Russell, too. It’s just amazing, the fortune of this band. It’s amazing to hear [Russell] sing, standing next to him — this amazing voice you’ve heard your whole life.”
Moore’s work with IIIrd Tyme Out will take a brief hiatus as Moore records and tours as part of Union Station.
“I didn’t think he would [join Union Station] because he’s got his own group,” Krauss says of reaching out to Moore. “But he was up for talking about it. And the way we’ve structured this tour is to make sure everybody can still do their own stuff. We’re going out for six months and then the rest of the year is to make sure everybody else’s projects are honored. I don’t think [Russell] would’ve [joined] had we not made sure that [IIIrd Tyme Out] would be honored, too. There was no way he was going to leave his group — he’s built that over 30-something years.”
The new album places vocals and stories at the fore, with the band expertly building each instrumental bed around Moore and Krauss’s voices. Many of the album’s songs center around despairing storylines, with some recording details of long-ago tragedies, such as the Civil War tale “Richmond on the James,” or when Moore takes the vocal lead on “Granite Mills,” which depicts the story of a fire at a mill in Massachusetts in 1874, which took the lives of more than a dozen people. Elsewhere, “Hangman” sets a desolate poem from Maurice Odgen to music.
“One thing that bluegrass tunes have never been afraid of is saying exactly what happened,” Krauss says of “Granite Mills.” “My son asked me not that long ago, ‘How do you sing these sad songs? I can’t even listen.’ I said, ‘I have to sing them, and I feel called to sing them. A lot of these stories you may not even know.’ I talked to someone who lived in the area that the mill tragedy happened in, and he said, ‘I didn’t even know that happened here.’ So here in this song, it’ll live forever. For me, these tragedy songs, they’re survival stories and they bring encouragement to people. Trying to survive will never go away, no matter what time in history. It’s just the human condition.”
The album does have some moments of levity, as when Bales and Block lighten the mood with “North Side Gal,” with twin fiddle work from Alison and Stuart Duncan. The album is bookended with another Lister song, “There’s a Light Up Ahead,” which lends a more hope-filled conclusion to the project.
The album reunites them with the founders of Rounder Records — Ken Irwin, Marian Leighton Levy, and Bill Nowlin — who launched a new label, Down the Road Records, in 2023. As with reuniting with Union Station, it was Krauss who made the first call.
“When I started to hear about them putting the label together, I was like, ‘I wonder if there’s room for us? If I don’t ask, I’ll never know,’” Krauss says. “Because those folks, they’re the real deal. They’re the evangelists of folk music and traditional music. I love being there with people that feel that way about the music, that it has to be heard and it has to be recorded. I love who they are, so I’m thrilled to be with them again.”
This spring, Alison Krauss & Union Station will launch their first tour in a decade, with 75 North American tour dates set. As for the possibility of another 14 years elapsing between projects for Krauss and Union Station, Krauss says, “No, it won’t be that long. I definitely hope not. I’m thrilled to be back with these guys and getting to make new music and play the older ones again. It’s so nice to hear the old songs.”
