Trouble in Paradise
Listening Post 390. Alison Krauss and her band Union Station are the gold standard for bluegrass and also a study in contrasts—so it hardly strains logic that the group’s latest album begins with a dead end. Floating on Krauss’s immaculate and restrained soprano, Looks Like the End of the Road is heartbreaking in its beauty and transcendent in regret (video). The song ushers in a 10-track collection that has more darkness than light but unfolds under the idyllic title Arcadia. This is the group’s first studio album in 14 years; its super-achieving members have been well occupied with other projects, in other combos, and their separate adventures have only sharpened their collective touch. Jerry Douglas remains a sonic anchor on Dobro and lap steel guitar, while the main lineup change is Russell Moore replacing Dan Tyminski as lead male vocalist. The songs explore struggles and watersheds, personal and collective; most are timeless, though some reflect events etched in history. A faint light emerges in The Wrong Way, a meditative ballad aching with experience, and it dims before Moore’s foreboding voice in The Hangman, based on Maurice Ogden’s 1951 poem-allegory with echoes of the Holocaust and McCarthyism. Richmond on the James, a midtempo elegy, captures the final conversation between two boyhood friends on a Civil War battlefield; while Granite Mills recalls a textile factory fire that took many lives and prompted changes in safety procedures and building codes. Arcadia is a stunning achievement, though its title straddles a line between subtle and striking. Krauss resists the idea that these tales are gloomy, seeing hope in survivor narratives. “A lot of times,” she said in a recent interview, “people don’t want to hear a sad story face to face, but they will listen to poetry and music.” It’s not hard to make the case that these troubled songs take us to the threshold of paradise. (Down the Road Records)

Alison Krauss & Union Station: Arcadia
Alison Krauss: Lead vocals, harmony vocals, fiddle, strings
Barry Bales: Upright bass, tenor vocals, bass vocals
Ron Block: Acoustic guitar, banjo, tenor vocals
Jerry Douglas: Dobro, lap steel guitar
Russel Moore: Lead vocals, baritone vocals
Dan Tyminski: Acoustic guitar, mandolin
Adam Steffey: Mandolin
Victor Krauss: Piano
Jeff Taylor: Accordion
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle

Note: The Alison Krauss & Union Station song The Lucky One, from the group’s 2001 album New Favorite, is #170 on the World Listening Post list of “The Global 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” https://worldlisteningpost.com/the-global-500-greatest-songs-of-all-time-page-2/

Looks Like the End of the Road
Jeremy Lister

The Wrong Way
Dan Tyminski, Robert Lee Castleman

The Hangman
Maurice Ogden, Viktor Krauss

Richmond on the James
G.T. Burgess, Alison Krauss

Granite Mills
Timothy Eriksen