Robert Plant will release Raise The Roof, a new album with American bluegrass and country singer Alison Krauss, on November 19 via Warner Music.
To mark the announcement, the pair have released the album's first single, Can't Let Go, written by Randy Weeks and first recorded by Lucinda Williams.
The album comes some 14 years on from the pair’s hugely successful collaboration on 2007’s Raising Sand, which scored five Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year (for Jimmy Page/Robert Plant song Please Read The Letter). Like its predecessor, the set was produced by T-Bone Burnett in Nashville’s Sound Emporium studios.
Songs set to feature on the album include Quattro, originally written and recorded by Calexico, Bert Jansch’s It Don’t Bother Me, Geeshie Wiley’s Last Kind Words, Go Your Way, My Love by Anne Briggs, Trouble With My Lover by Betty Harris and Searching For My Baby by Bobby Moore and the Rhythm Aces, which Nashville session man Greg Leisz, who played on Raising Sand, described as “incredible” on the Everyone Loves Guitar podcast in June. The collection reflects the artists' life-long inspirations, such as Plant's fascination with English folk traditions, which he has loved since adolescence, while Krauss recalls it was hearing the song Quattro (World Drift In) by the American group Calexico, as “the moment I knew we’d make another album.”
She continues, “We wanted it to move. We brought other people in, other personalities within the band, and coming back together again in the studio brought a new intimacy to the harmonies.”
Plant adds, “You hear something and you go ‘Man, listen to that song, we got to sing that song!’ It’s a vacation, really—the perfect place to go that you least expected to find.”
In conversation with MOJO magazine, the former Led Zeppelin singer says: “The good thing with Alison and I is that we’re a couple of kindred spirits. Most musicians form a band, then they stay in the band until it’s over - 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, whatever it is - and it starts to look really decrepit…
"With us, there’s nothing written in blood. We were ready to do something new, and we knew how good it was before, so we can just join up again and see where we go. We’ve got nothing to lose.”
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss are also scheduled to tour together in 2022, with dates to be announced soon.
Listen to Can't Let Go below:
Raise The Roof tracklist:
1. Quattro (World Drifts In)
2. The Price of Love
3. Go Your Way
4. Trouble With My Lover
5. Searching for My Love
6. Can’t Let Go
7. It Don’t Bother Me
8. You Led Me to The Wrong
9. Last Kind Words Blues
10. High and Lonesome
11. Going Where the Lonely Go
12. Somebody Was Watching Over Me
