Out of the blue, Jo Bartlett, the co-organiser of the small folk festival, Green Man, received a phone call one day from someone purporting to be Robert Plant. Understandably, she was suspicious. But no, it really was Plant. Having read about the Green Man, Plant was wondering if he and his band might be allowed to play there.

It’s a story worth dwelling on, if only for what it tells us about Plant, who is almost unique among his peers inasmuch as he remains, first and foremost, a fan. So it shouldn’t surprise us that his latest album came about as a result of another moment wondering who should be the recipient of his next bizarre phone call.

As a fiddle-playing country-bluegrass singer born in the same year that Plant helped to write Stairway to Heaven, Alison Krauss wasn’t an obvious choice. Less obvious still was the serendipity of the pairing (a dozen covers and Please Read the Letter, from Plant and Page’s No Quarter album) that catapults both singers clear of their respective comfort zones.

Radiohead make Mercury shortlist

Radiohead competes with The Last Shadow Puppets, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss and Estelle for the prestigious prize

Background

• Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

• New country for old men

• Robert Plant & Alison Krauss: Raising Sand

• The odd couple

• Top Five Gigs: Paul Weller

Krauss is, at least, recognisably herself on Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us. Her gypsy violin entwines beautifully with Mike Seeger’s plaintive banjo picking. Singing here and on Tom Waits’s Trampled Rose by herself, she sounds like the last person standing in the aftermath of some great biblical disaster. Singing with Plant on one of two Gene Clark songs, Through the Morning, Through the Night, she carries the story with the care of a mother holding a newborn baby. It’s left to Plant then to turn a sad song into a truly heartbreaking one with a harmony of exquisite restraint.

You would have to be a fan of these songs to serve them so selflessly, but that makes Plant the showman’s ability to set aside four decades as the sole focus of attention no less remarkable. That’s them sounding like the two voices of a single broken heart on Killing The Blues; conferring hushed hymnal grace on Your Long Journey; sounding all but indistinguishable from the debris of the loss detailed on Polly Come Home.

Krauss may have never sounded better than she does here; as for Plant, though, it doesn’t make sense to say the same thing. On Raising Sand, he has quite simply found a whole new voice. Who knew? As he prepares to close the book on Led Zeppelin next month, he could do a lot worse than keep this one open for a while.

(Rounder)

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