Alison Krauss never stops searching for songs. But she only records them when she’s ready.
“She does it 24/7/365,” said Barry Bales, the bassist in her band Union Station since 1990. “She’s on the lookout for songs, and she’s a song hoarder. She’ll hear a song she likes, and it may never see the light of day for 15, 20 years. But she’ll remember it.”
A decade after Krauss’s last tour with Union Station, and 14 years after the band’s previous studio album, the singer and fiddler has reconvened the group for “Arcadia,” an album due Friday. “I’ve been gathering tunes for this since the last time we recorded,” Krauss, 53, said in a video interview from the Doghouse, a Nashville studio where she has recorded for decades. “I’m just waiting for the first song to show up, until ‘Ah, here it is — it’s time to record.’ It’s always been that way.”
That first song was Jeremy Lister’s “Looks Like the End of the Road,” a bitterly mournful waltz about disillusionment and despair: “The lines that were drawn a long time ago / Are buried and gone in lies and ego,” she sings. It sets the dark tone for “Arcadia,” an album of 10 tracks, all but two of them in minor keys, with lyrics full of bleak tidings. At the end, the album offers a glimpse of redemption in another Lister song: “There’s a Light Up Ahead.”
When Krauss heard “Looks Like the End of the Road,” during the peak of the Covid pandemic, her intuition told her it was the starting point of that long-awaited album. “It just has to be the right timing, for things to be the most truthful representation,” she said. “Had I not found that song when I did, who knows when we would have gone in?”
“Arcadia” reconvenes and reconfigures a band that has transformed the sound of modern bluegrass by constantly drawing new subtleties from old-time roots. Union Station can easily muster the quick-fingered virtuosity required for upbeat, foot-stomping bluegrass tunes that punctuate its albums and live sets. But what makes the band so distinctive is its quietly incandescent restraint: the hushed concentration it summons behind Krauss’s pristinely melancholy soprano, which can sound haunted even when she sings about true love.
Union Station released its debut album in 1989, and even as its audience grew, its music sought more subtlety and intimacy. With each album, Krauss and her musicians have further stripped away showy technical displays and ornamental flourishes, rigorously distilling their arrangements to focus on the song rather than the performers. “I want to be a servant to the story,” Krauss said.
“If somebody presses play on my banjo solo on a song, I don’t want them to go, ‘Oh, that’s a lot of notes,’” said Ron Block, a Union Station member since 1991. “I want them to recognize the song. It’s not about amazing people as much as it is about moving people.”
Jerry Douglas, the dobro player who joined Union Station in 1998, said, “This band listens to one another more than any band I’ve ever been in.”
“We all discovered what a powerful vehicle it is to have her singing these songs, and to calm the flurries of notes down a little bit,” he added. “It’s there and it’s hiding, bubbling underneath, ready to come out and gobble up everything at any point. But another thing about it is knowing that you can do that — but not doing it.”
Douglas — whose dobro and steel guitar often answer Krauss’s voice with keening, sighing alternate melodies — has long been a first-call Nashville studio musician, bandleader, collaborator and producer. Among his recent projects are “The Set,” his 2024 album as a leader; recording with Celtic musicians in Scotland for the Transatlantic Sessions series; and producing an upcoming album for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
The other Union Station members also stayed active between albums. Krauss released “Windy City,” a more mainstream country album, in 2017, and in 2021 she and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant released their second duet album, “Raise the Roof,” followed by a tour. (Their first album, “Raising Sand,” won the Grammy for album of the year in 2009.) Bales and Block toured with Krauss for “Windy City,” played studio sessions, wrote songs and released instructional videos.
“Everybody’s always gone and done their own thing and had a very busy career outside of this band,” Krauss said. “When we come back together, we’ve lived all these other places, and it just makes it stronger. I’ve always felt like, you know, life sounds good on people.”
“Arcadia” marks a major lineup change in Union Station. For three decades, Dan Tyminski traded off lead vocals with Krauss, providing a grainy, rough-hewed contrast to the delicacy of her voice. He won Grammy Awards with Union Station and on his own, notably for “Man of Constant Sorrow” from the 2000 Coen Brothers movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
During the sessions for “Arcadia,” Tyminski decided he wanted to continue his solo career instead of joining Union Station on tour this year. “Nobody wanted Dan to go,” Douglas said. “But Dan’s got a thing he’s got to go do, and we all respect that.”
Although Tyminski worked on instrumental sessions for the album, the male lead vocals are sung by Russell Moore, who has led one of the top groups on the bluegrass circuit, IIIrd Tyme Out, for three decades. “He and Dan are the best of that generation of that high, beautiful bluegrass singing,” Krauss said. “His pitch — he’s just a laser beam.”
Moore will tour with Union Station this year, putting IIIrd Tyme Out on hold. “I had no desire to give up my own band,” Moore said. “She assured me that’s not what she was asking for.”
Musically, Moore said, Union Station “is a totally different world to live in.”
“I’m a pretty full-throated type singer,” he continued. “Now I’m having to learn how to sing from a different place. On the songs that I’m singing lead on, I have the opportunity to go to my normal place and belt it out like I have been for years. But on the harmony stuff, what part of my voice do I put my vocal at to match and complement what Alison is doing?”
The songs on “Arcadia” encompass both personal and historical tribulations. With a smile, Krauss described them as tales about “the good old days when times were bad.”
Some of the songs draw on old public-domain ballads. “Richmond on the James” recounts the last words of a dying Civil War soldier, and “Granite Mills” vividly describes a fatal 1874 fire in a textile mill.
“I love a true story,” Krauss said. “I don’t know how many of our favorite love songs were based on truth. And if it wasn’t that story itself that was true, the feeling was. Everyone has these emotions. It’s just that the circumstances change.”
In 2010, Krauss said, she discovered “The Hangman,” a 1951 poem by Maurice Ogden that’s a parable about the coming of fascism. She asked her brother, the bassist Viktor Krauss, to write a melody for it, and Moore sings its ominous opening verses.
Discreetly but pervasively, Viktor Krauss also shaped the sound of the entire album, orchestrating it with sustained string arrangements overdubbed by his sister. The album opens with an eerie, tremulous, cinematic string ensemble. “I wanted to have a new sound as the first thing we heard,” she said.
Other songs on the album — from Robert Lee Castleman, one of Krauss’s longtime songwriting sources — are about heartbreak, regrets and life lessons: “The Wrong Way” and “Forever,” which laments, “I can’t hold on and I can’t let go.”
For Krauss, Union Station’s songs are “survival stories,” she said. “Someone survived to tell them. So for me, these sad songs are very encouraging. They’ve told someone’s story and that’s how we are going to remember them forever. Whatever that the situation was, it’s over. And you’ve gotten through it.”
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