Alison Krauss has been known in bluegrass and country music since she was sixteen years old.\u00a0 But in 1997 with So Long, So Wrong<\/i>, she turned a corner with her musical approach and came into her own. All of her previous releases had been pretty traditional. By 1997, it had been five years since she had done an album with her backing band Union Station, a solid group of musicians consisting of Ron Block on banjo, Barry Bales on bass, Tim Stafford on the guitar (replaced by Dan Tyminski on So Long So Wrong<\/i>), and Adam Steffey on mandolin. The 1992 release Everytime You Say Goodbye<\/i> was intensely traditional bluegrass and won the 1993 Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. Following that, Krauss took a detour to join up with the Cox Family for a bluegrass gospel album in 1994. By 1997, the style had changed dramatically, with several melodies that could be considered slow, haunting or melancholy and certainly progressive, interspersed by tracks of solid bluegrass rhythms supplied by Tyminski, Block, and Steffey.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
This feeling is apparent from the very first track, \u201cSo Long, So Wrong,\u201d with a fade-in of a fiddle drone note, female \u201cahhs,\u201d and some other instrumentation building to a crescendo that gives way to the first flat-picked notes on a dreadnought guitar. It is one of Krauss\u2019 few upbeat song leads on the album. Other songs that Krauss takes the lead vocal on for the album are the very slow “I Can Let Go Now,\u201d written by Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers, “It Doesn’t Matter,” and a great rendition of a tune originally tracked by Patty Loveless, “Looking In The Eyes Of Love.” There\u2019s also the moderately slow “Deeper Than Crying,” “Happiness” (written again by Michael McDonald but also co-written with Krauss\u2019 brother Viktor) and the exquisitely produced and slightly faster “Find My Way Back To My Heart.”<\/p>\n
All that is to say that while the songs when Krauss takes the lead vocal are good, they are mostly downbeat, slow tunes. The real gems are the true bluegrass songs put in place by the backing group. Adam Steffey turns in an insanely catchy track with “No Place To Hide,” while Tyminski shines on \u201cThe Road Is A Lover\u201d and the traditional tune “I’ll Remember You Love In My Prayers.” Ron Block gives two original tracks with \u201cPain Of A Troubled Life\u201d and the Krauss-led gospel track \u201cThere Is A Reason\u201d (also slow), which is absolutely divine. The group also performs an incredibly serious, virtuosic take on \u201cLittle Liza Jane\u201d that is 1990s bluegrass at its finest.<\/p>\n
Somehow, the alternating of slow songs from Krauss, and the upbeat songs from the band forms a powerful mix of music that is enduring. This album arguably holds together as a cohesive collection far better than anything that Krauss has put out between its release and this writing. It is no wonder the album produced three Grammy awards in 1998 and introduced a lot of people to bluegrass who had never considered it before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":32373,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[6650],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-44128","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-alison-krauss-and-union-station","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=44128"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=44128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}