Even with a fourteen-year gap between albums with Union Station, Alison Krauss has remained a musical force. Her duo albums with Led Zeppelin lead singer Robert Plant serve as an indicator of her versatility. With the release of Arcadia, her tenth studio album since her debut at 16, Krauss returns—not that she ever left—to the music that made her a standard-bearer for roots music.
Krauss has obviously been song-collecting in the interim since the release of the last AKUS album Paper Airplane in 2011. She reportedly found the album’s starting point with “Looks Like the End of the Road,” written by Jeremy Lister. Selected as opening track, it highlights Krauss’s pure, clear vocals that have earned her so many awards and a huge fan base. The song features a stripped-down melody, with dobro and mandolin breaks, with simple harmony on just a note or two until the final refrain.
