She’s everywhere! Alison Krauss, that is.
With yesterday’s long-awaited release of Paper Airplane, her first full project with Union Station since Lonely Runs Both Ways in 2004, the music media is aflutter with Alison sightings.
One place we were surprised to see her pop up was in Elle magazine, but there she is on their web site.
Rebecca Milzoff has written a nice piece for Elle derived from a recent interview. Here’s a bit about the writer of the new album’s title track.
Krauss has never written her own songs—she considers herself an interpreter, though she’ll bring kernels of ideas to writers she works with—and she was glad to return to a longtime collaborator, Robert Lee Castleman, for Paper Airplane’s linchpin title track. “I felt like we didn’t have our record until ‘Paper Airplane’ came up,” she says. “He has been consistently for me the reason I felt like we could go record.” Krauss and Castleman met years ago at a birthday party for her ex-husband. “Everybody’d gone home, and somebody handed him a guitar and he sang a song called ‘Forget About It.’ And he changed my life. Nothing will ever be the same again.” Much like Krauss herself, there’s more to Castleman than meets the eye. “R.L. Castleman, if you knew him!” Krauss exclaims. “He writes these incredibly soft, poetic, heartbroken lyrics, and he himself is a scream. The other day we were gonna go out to breakfast, and he was like, ‘No, I’ve got to go get a gold tooth put in my dentures.’ And he’s dead serious!”
We are interviewing Ms. Krauss this morning, and will try to get something up from that as soon as possible. Paper Airplane is a terrific project, and well worth the attention of anyone who appreciates acoustic music of the highest quality.
