24 April 2017

Four years in the making, Alison Krauss’s first solo album in 18 years – Windy City – was anything but plain sailing. But, as the bluegrass star tells Paul Dimery, she overcame the turbulence to emerge triumphant. Alison Krauss sounds a bit fed up. An afternoon of phone interviews has left her hoarse and exhausted, and now she’s struggling with my British brogue and a transatlantic phone line that insists on cutting out every few minutes, leaving both of us hanging in mid-air. After exchanging niceties, I begin our interview proper by asking for a personal recollection of her formative years, before she rose to fame as one of the world’s biggest country stars and began collecting Grammy Awards for fun (she has 27 to date, making her the most prolific living recipient along with Quincy Jones, a man 38 years her senior). There’s a long pause at the other end of the phone as she casts her mind back through her career. A very long pause. Then a crackle. Nope, the line has gone dead again. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Originally, Country Music was set to meet the Illinois-born bluegrass sensation in person, in London, prior to an intimate gig at the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios where she would showcase her new album, Windy City. But a throat infection meant that Krauss had to cancel her visit to the UK at the last minute, and so here we are, trying to overcome tiredness and technology on either side of the Pond. No wonder she’s feeling frustrated. “I’m still not completely over [the illness],” she rasps when the connection finally remedies itself. “It was only supposed to last about three weeks, but it’s not letting go.” Early virtuosity Her downbeat nature today jars with those oft-recounted tales of the wildly talented ingénue who entered her first fiddle contests aged eight, laying waste to her rivals with thrillingly offbeat renditions of The Beatles and Bad Company; formed her first band at 10; and discovered bluegrass music at the tender age of 12, taking a shine to banjo stalwarts Ralph Stanley and J.D. Crowe while her school mates were listening to Cyndi Lauper. When the Society For The Preservation Of Bluegrass in America labelled Krauss the ‘Most Promising Fiddler in the Midwest’, and Vanity Fair magazine followed suit by describing her as a “virtuoso”, she’d not yet reached her 14th birthday. “I would just show up and do my thing,” says Krauss, recalling those early competitions with a modesty that belies her lofty achievements. “I don’t remember being goofy or nervous about doing them at all, and I think that might’ve been irritating to my folks. They felt like I should be taking things a bit more seriously or realise what was going on, but I don’t remember being terribly aware.” It was Krauss’s mother, Louise, who’d first set young Alison on her path to musical destiny, encouraging her daughter to learn the classical violin at the age of five. But Alison soon gave that up to pursue what she deemed to be her true calling in life: “I liked fiddle music a lot,” she explains. “I would spend hours cassette-recording the famous fiddle players and learning the tunes that other people did. I studied how they held their bow and tapped their feet, that kind of thing.” She proved to be a natural; indeed, such was her skill with the instrument that she quickly found herself in demand among seasoned artists looking for session talent. One of those, bassist and songwriter John Pennell, was so impressed with this fresh-faced starlet, he invited her to join his band Silver Rail (later to become Union Station). It proved to be a match made in heaven; Krauss’ energetic performances with the group helped to earn her a deal with Rounder Records – putting her on the same label as one of her childhood heroes, J.D. Crowe – and while Pennell eventually drifted away from the line-up, his protégé has recorded and toured with them prolifically ever since. In fact, we’ve become so used to Krauss performing with Union Station, it came as something of a surprise to learn that, though certain members of the band make cameo appearances on the recording, Windy City is officially a solo venture – Alison’s first since 1999’s underrated Forget About It. In those 18 years Krauss has contributed bluegrass tracks to the Coen brothers’ Hollywood hit O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), appeared on stage at the Academy Awards, where she performed two nominated Appalachian songs from the movie Cold Mountain (2004), and recorded a successful rock/folk crossover album with Led Zeppelin icon Robert Plant (2007’s Raising Sand). So what was the thinking behind this career curveball? “Every now and again, I’ll do a record without the band,” she answers matter-of-factly. “We all do it from time to time. I haven’t done one in a long while, but it didn’t feel weird at all. I don’t do anything that I’m not inspired to do.” Nostalgic tribute In this case, her inspiration came from the past – specifically her own past. Windy City is a gloriously nostalgic scrapbook of Krauss’s favourite country songs – 10 standards and rarities originally recorded by artists as diverse as Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, Eddy Arnold and The Osborne Brothers – all lovingly recrafted in her own inimitable style. “I wanted to sing songs that are older than I am,” she told Rolling Stone magazine in the build-up to the album’s release. “There’s a real romance in singing other people’s stories.” It’s a brave yet brilliant record, and listening to Krauss’s hymnal longing on Brenda Lee’s All Alone Am I, or her tender vibrato on Glen Campbell’s Gentle On My Mind, it’s hard not to feel that Windy City is the LP she was always destined to make. And yet, recording it was anything but a breeze. While sessions began in 2013, it was another four years before the album

Meet the cross-Atlantic, harmonising duo who draw on their sense of home for inspiration – by Steve Faragher. With their mouthwatering close harmonies, great songs and very personable stage presence, Lewis & Leigh look like a pair of singers with no ceiling. While they’re definitely country, they bring an exciting modern twist to their lyrics that makes them sound quite unlike any other act in these pages. Formerly two solo artists in their own right, Al Lewis from Wales and Alva Leigh from Mississippi met at a Matthew Perryman Jones gig in London in 2013. “I’d worked with Matthew in Nashville,” explains Al. “He had this backing singer with him and I got him to introduce us.” The pair struck up an immediate rapport, and before they knew it were writing songs together. Al expands: “We said ‘let’s pencil in some writing, then’ with no other plan than for it to perhaps appear on one of our solo albums.” So was it exciting to work together from the start? “Day one, the first thing that excited me was the song What Is There To Do, Al continues: “It sounded really good, but Alva did the singing on that first one. It wasn’t until a bit later that we started really singing together.” “Yeah,” Alva takes up the tale. “We didn’t think about arranging it as a duo song till later. But then we realised we had something special. It was a wonderful surprise.” Suited to each other You may never have heard two voices so suited to each other. “I always laugh that maybe I have Welsh blood, and Al and I are long-lost cousins. There has to be a reason we sing so well together.” A good-looking pair, Al comes across as the more business-like of the two. Clearly driven, he’s jumped through some music business hoops already to get to where he is today. Alva’s more prone to laughing, but equally serious, and also has a solid history of music-making behind her. But they took it slowly when it came to making music together. It was six months after that meeting, in early 2014, that they wrote their first song, and over the next few months they went on a journey of musical self-discovery via three EPs. “Each EP, we explored different influences,” says Al. “The first one was straight down the middle country; we used pedal steel and every single instrument that we thought signposted country, like mandolins and all that.” Alva continues, “The second EP was more folk noir. Very dark, brooding songs with some fiddle and banjo and Al got a beautiful new guitar, a 1965 Gibson with a beautiful tone. That guitar inspired the second EP. And then on the third we went down the big band/southern soul rock vibe with a horn arrangement.” The album doesn’t sound much like any of those, but is the big band something that might appeal to them later on in their careers? Alva laughs: “Well that would be fun, but we do know that what we have at the moment works, and when you add more elements sometimes it does make it better but sometimes it dilutes what you have.” So having experimented, what did they decide on for their first album? “They were very different EPs and we didn’t feel we could just mush them all together and make an album, so we decided to start from scratch,” says Al. “I think it was good that we entertained all these different kinds of influences that we have,” Alva continues, “and so when it came time to make the album we started from scratch. We said, ‘let’s strip this all away and see what’s left and also look at our live set and see what we can do there, because we won’t be able to tour with a horn section, much as I wish we could’. We wanted the album to be simple and to come back to what we did in that first songwriting session where it’s just two voices and a guitar.” Chicken noodles in broth The album was recorded over a cold period in London at a studio where Laura Marling had just made her critically-acclaimed album Short Movie. It was so cold they still fondly remember going out every day for a bowl of Vietnamese chicken noodles in broth to warm up. But in just two four-week sessions the album was done. Opening track There Is A Light sums up the newly-discovered, stripped-back sound perfectly. Starting with just a harmony, sparse instrumentation fills in the almost-hymnal structure of the song, but where did the inspiration for it come from?” “There Is A Light is about where we’re both from,” says Alva. “The first verse is about the house I grew up in, and that feeling of home. But neither Al nor I live where we’re from; we’ll probably never live where we’re from.” Al explains: “We both grew up in small places. Alva is from a small town on the Gulf Of Mexico called Gulfport and I’m from North Wales, and we both have really fond memories of how we grew up, but we never see ourselves living in a place like that again.” So where do they live now? Al’s based in Cardiff, and Alva in Oxford. And how does the songwriting process work for them? Al explains. “We each bring something different and we help each other in our weaknesses. I tend to think about the big picture of a song – you know, the chorus and the need to grab people, whereas Alva is more about the details, the things you pick up on listen three or listen four, whereas I’m like, ‘let’s not worry about that’. So I think we complement each other well.” Lewis & Leigh are already catching on in Germany. They’ve already been snapped up by German TV for a guest appearance on a flagship show, and you can imagine their intense personal harmonies working