Given her two albums and tours with Robert Plant, including one last summer, it’s easy to forget that Alison Krauss is in another band too, and has been for a while. On March 28, we will be reminded with the release of Arcadia, the first album in 14 years by Krauss and Union Station, her longtime acoustic band.
Billed as an album of songs that are “contemporary reflections on history,” Arcadia features tunes written by an array of writers, including JD McPherson and Sarah Siskind (whose “Simple Love” was included on an earlier Krauss album). The song titles alone — “The Hangman,” “Granite Mills,” “Richmond on the James,” “North Side Gal” — conjure a mythic dust-bowl America. “The stories of the past are told in this music,” Krauss said in a statement. “It’s that whole idea of ‘in the good old days when times were bad.’ There’s so much bravery and valor and loyalty and dreaming, of family and themes of human existence that were told in a certain way when our grandparents were alive. Someone asked me, ‘How do you sing these tragic tunes?’ I have to. It’s a calling. And I want to hear what happened.”
Arcadia marks Krauss’ first album with Union Station, the band she joined as a teenager, since Paper Airplane back in 2011. In the years that followed, Krauss thought outside the musical box: She made a more jauntily produced country-and-otherwise covers album, 2017’s Windy City, and reunited with Plant for 2021’s Raise the Roof, the long-overdue follow-up to their Raising Sand. Her live performances with Plant unleashed another element of her singing and fiddle playing, removed from the more austere work she’s done on her own and with Union Station.
Along with a return to her acoustic-music roots, Arcadia also introduces a slightly tweaked version of Union Station. Singer, guitarist, and mandolin player Russell Moore, formerly of the bluegrass band IIIrd Tyme Out, is now part of the ensemble along with its other longtime members — dobro player Jerry Douglas, bassist Barry Bales, and guitarist and banjo player Ron Block. On April 17, the band will start a lengthy tour that is currently slated to continue through the end of September.
Arcadia is being previewed with its first single, “Looks like the End of the Road,” which spotlights Krauss’ undiminished soprano and has the lulling ache of her previous work with the band. In light of the jarring transition of power in D.C. right now, the song’s chorus — “Goodbye to the world that I know/Looks like the end of the road” — could serve as an unintentional soundtrack to whatever lies ahead. When we last heard from her and Union Station, after all, Donald Trump was still best known as the host of The Celebrity Apprentice.
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