When Alison Krauss was kicking around ideas on what to name her latest album with Union Station, the eureka moment came while on the phone with a friend, who just happened to be on their way to play a church gig in a tiny Louisiana town called Arcadia.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, what a beautiful name.’ I got off the phone and looked up what it meant,” Krauss tells Rolling Stone, explaining that “arcadia” describes a region of simple pleasure and quiet. “It couldn’t be [truer] to what we were doing.”
With a humming blend of bluegrass, country, and folk music, Arcadia is the first Alison Krauss & Union Station album in 14 years. The record once again showcases the meteoric talent that’s always resided within the powerhouse ensemble since their debut album Two Highways in 1989, when Krauss — a songbird vocalist and elegant fiddler player — was just a teenager.
“We never intended for it to be this long,” Krauss says of the band’s absence. “It was overdue. And I was looking for songs for the next record for us when we were still making the last one.”
Krauss let the idea of “arcadia” shape the album process, especially the nature component of the word. It’s this pastoral landscape where time doesn’t seem to exist, flush with cherished images in your mind of people, places, and things you miss and yearn for.
“It’s like that [Dolly Parton] song, ‘In the good old days when times were bad,’” Krauss chuckles.
Krauss points to the storied paintings of Norman Rockwell, iconic illustrations that depicted daily American life on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post for decades. The sentimental images still conjure such vivid memories in the hearts of many.
“It’s normal life in such a beautiful presentation,” Krauss says. “It’s honor, loyalty, community, family, faith, belief system. It was presented as encouragement when things are tough. And I always felt the same way about bluegrass tunes. In my mind, they always took place in a Norman Rockwell painting — those stories, those old songs.”
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Union Station never really left. You circle back from time to time. But why did it feel that it was time to get the band back together?
It was a lot with [scheduling] with everybody. When you tour, everybody books six months to nine months in advance, you know? And then, there were four other people. There are schedules besides my own to make it happen. I guess I first wrote everybody, “Hey, I got these songs.” I think it was the beginning of 2021. It just took so long to make it happen, to find a time when everybody could be together. But, in between, everybody’s made records. I made a couple records. It shouldn’t have taken so long.
A lot has changed in bluegrass, country, and Americana music in the last 14 years. Union Station were trailblazers that really opened up a lot of doors in those worlds. I’m curious what you see right now in this new landscape?
Well, Billy Strings has such respect and honors the old songs. We all love that about him, that he keeps those old songs alive and records the old tunes that we all grew up playing. He’s a trailblazer at the same time. He’s a traditionalist. And Sierra Ferrell, who sings everything, she’s as good as anybody’s ever been, as far as being an incredible singer and representing someone who honors the past as much as she is making her own way. I love what those two people are doing for acoustic music that we all love so much.
I would surmise there’s a lot of solidarity with what your intent was, and remains, as an artist, similar to where they are now.
I love beautiful songs and telling the story. And everybody in the band has always had such a unique, individual sound to them. Everybody has the same mentality of “let’s just present these songs in the way that we feel like they should be.” There’s never been a lot of contriving with arrangements or forcing something because it seemed clever. We wanted it to always be a very natural production. That’s always been the attitude for us. I never thought I’d end up doing this for a living, anyway. So, it’s all been a surprise. [Laughs]. And when I say “anyway,” it was just always something I loved and thought about all day long as a kid. Thought about the songs and what everybody was looking like when they recorded in the studio, what the studio looked like and what they were thinking about when they were singing. Those were the things of my daydream.
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You come across as somebody who’s probably never lost the childlike wonder of creating, and also having gratitude for what you’re creating.
Oh, that’s so nice. I feel that way. I’m enamored with it. A lot of times when I come home from the studio, even when it’s a tough day, I come home and I can’t stop thinking about it. [Laughs]. When you’re recording, you’re going along and you have to really evaluate yourself. You’re trying to get every syllable in a beautiful spot with some kind of shine on it, you know? It takes a while to get that. I have no pride, whatever it takes to get it there. I do love the process, ’cause those tiny things just can change the atmosphere sometimes. And even if you’re sailing along and it’s going, every now and then you might hit excellent. And they may be few and far between, but boy, when it does, it lasts you through the next however long period of working on something. Every now and then, you can be a part of something that might reach something excellent and it will last you a lifetime.
If you didn’t go through that process, you wouldn’t have hit that excellent point. You can’t shortcut it.
No, I don’t think you can shortcut. But I’ll say this, those guys [in Union Station], when we do the tracks, they are smooth. That’s an easy, beautiful process. It’s magical in there with the headphones on. It’s just such a natural thing. And maybe they’d feel differently, but I don’t. I don’t see it that way as any kind of labor, they play so beautifully. It’s so selfless when I hear it go down that, unless I’m wrong, those days are like butter. Now me, that’s another story. [Laughs].
Arcadia has a heaviness to the songs.
My son asked me, “How do you sing all these sad songs?” I always have. I always feel like it’s a survivor’s story.
That’s the weird thing about it, where bluegrass is like blues music. It’s very sad, but it’s meant to uplift you.
Yeah. And it does. Somebody tells their story and you plug yourself in and they’ve told it for you. People all have the same emotions, circumstances change. A lot of times, that’s how history, that’s how people’s stories get remembered. If someone puts it in a song, it’ll live forever. It’s so important to remember, and in bluegrass especially, it’s a way of life. Those tunes that most people who play this kind of music, they always say, “I was born in the wrong time. I was born in the wrong decade.” And they all want to live in there. I do, too.
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With the new album, there’s a big tour coming up. But the bigger news to the side of that was vocalist and guitarist Dan Tyminski leaving Union Station, and Russell Moore coming in. What was that process like, and why was Russell the guy?
Dan had been doing his solo music for a while as we’d been off and not playing together. So, he had a lot of things he’d been doing. And when we got back together, he was very proud of what he was doing. When we look back through that process, it doesn’t seem that shocking he wanted to stay with that. He felt like he couldn’t balance both of them. And I knew he was stressed about that when we started to record. I knew he was worried about that. We all did. And in bluegrass during that generation, both Dan and Russell are at the same time. Russell is the other guy who was that super powerful tenor voice that kind of defined a generation of singing.
I first saw Russell when I was 14 and he was 21. I didn’t talk to him, but I saw him sing onstage. And there’s pictures of me with my mouth open watching him. He had just joined Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver. Russell came in there and just took over. And when this came up with Dan, we all got on the phone together. [Dobroist] Jerry [Douglas] said to me, “What do you think?” And I said, “Russell Moore.” They all went, “Oh, yes.” It was a very sweet moment, like a unanimous excitement about the possibility of him coming… I’m just grateful to have a chance to do this again.
