Alison Krauss – The bluegrass rose blooms
With her fourth Rounder album, 1992’s Every Time You Say Goodbye, Krauss began producing, a role she has come to understand more fully with time. “You have to know when to get in the way and when to get out of the way,” she says. “I just ask myself, can I listen to this a thousand times?”
In addition to her own albums, Krauss has produced records for Reba McEntire, the Cox Family, and Nickel Creek. “As a producer, I have to think I have something I can add,” she says. “I can be very hands-on, but I’m hands-off in some respects, of course. With Nickel Creek, I realized we had very different musical tastes. While we recorded their first album, I would say: If you play too much, if it’s too flashy, it’s not gonna last. People aren’t gonna want to hear it over time. If you want to play it like that, play it like that live, but not on the record. We want listeners not to get enough of it. That’s the goal.”
Krauss’ story, as she is always at pains to remind journalists, is also the story of her band, Union Station. Though the members changed during the group’s first decade — including Jeff White, Mike Harman, John Pennell, Brent Truitt, Tim Stafford and Adam Steffey — Krauss eventually solidified the lineup of Tyminski, Douglas, Block and Bales.
“I can’t imagine going on without this lineup,” she says. “I believe everyone is on the same page musically, as far as what their likes are. I hope it keeps on staying together, I don’t want it to change.”
Bales, who has been with Krauss since 1990, grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee, immersed in the sound of bluegrass. “For the longest time I wasn’t aware that there was any other kind of music,” he says. “When I got into high school, worrying about what was cool, I got into more modern popular music. But the bluegrass I listened to was very first-generation stuff: Flatt & Scruggs, Reno & Smiley. I had been listening to it for a long time, attempting to play for two or three years, before I even knew who Tony Rice was, what people call more modern bluegrass.”
Bales played in a bluegrass band called Flint Hill and then did a stint as lead guitarist with a ’50s cover band called the Cadillacs. “I hadn’t played lead guitar before and got thrown into it,” he recalls. “I learned how to improvise and received a lot of stage experience.”
Bales joined Dusty Miller in 1986 and got his first taste of the festival circuit, where he first met Krauss. “The bluegrass festival circuit is like a traveling high school reunion,” he says. “Everybody knows everybody. And even if they won’t say it, everybody has in the back of their minds one or two people, in case someone leaves the band.”
Immediately after hooking up with Krauss, Bales found himself in recording studio with Michelle Shocked and the rest of Union Station, playing on Shocked’s Arkansas Traveler album. “If memory serves, that was the first session I did with the band,” Bales says. “Up to that point I had been used to recording in people’s basements. I was just sitting in the corner watching everything transpire. Michelle had definite ideas on how to present things; she really had a vision for it.”
Ron Block joined Union Station shortly after the Arkansas Traveler sessions, replacing Alison Brown on banjo. His style — fluid, light-of-touch, and highly melodic — derives as much from his study of acknowledged masters like Scruggs and Crowe, as it does from his love of guitar. “My brother had Rumours,” Block says, “and Lindsay Buckingham fingerpicking ‘Never Going Back Again’ on the acoustic guitar really struck me. That was the first time I remember really being captivated by the sound of an acoustic guitar.
“In my late teens and early twenties, I was getting into electric guitar; Pat Metheny, Larry Carlton, Eric Clapton, B.B. King. I love the emotional quality of the electric guitar, especially the string bending. Early on I began to apply bending techniques to acoustic guitar. Another big influence is Clarence White. His sense of syncopation always fascinated me; he was so unpredictable without being chaotic, playing the melody while still being surprising.
“It was only a matter of time before these influences came out in my banjo playing. When I joined Union Station back in 1991, they really freed me up to be more bendy and syncopated with the banjo.”
As a songwriter, Block has contributed a spiritual sensibility that somehow matches and balances out the songs of heartache and loss to which Krauss is most drawn. “I had a lot of turmoil in my early years, divorced parents, step-siblings coming and going,” Blocks says of his California childhood. “This created the emotional background for what I do musically; playing music became for me a way to get those feelings out into the open air.
“Every person’s life philosophy is going to affect their art,” he continues. “The two things can’t be separated. I’ve been a Christian since 1970, and it’s been a long, convoluted journey to finding that inner home inside myself where Christ lives. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life studying, thinking, and dealing with that struggle, so it’s no wonder that when I go to write a song it usually comes out as gospel.
“The Christian life is about Christ living his self-giving love through us and, aside from the more obvious aspects of writing gospel songs, that life inside of me has affected how I approach playing in a band. The ego has to check out, and the focus must be on putting the song across — on supporting the singer and the other musicians. That attitude won’t gain one a lot of attention, but it makes a band stronger.”