Robert Plant & Alison Krauss: “There’s A Lot Of Love”
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have been talking about hopes for their partnership in the future and going back on the road in a new interview with Rolling Stone.
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When asked about what makes their gigs special, Plant answered, “Well, we’ve been growing from the nervous formality of the very initial kicking it off after so many years of being apart and not really being sure, or even imagining that we would ever get back together. If you go back to all that time ago, in the beginning of the Raise the Roof recordings, the idea of taking it beyond there was it was very tentative, really, but nerve-wracking.
“And I don’t know if you think this, Alison, but when we doing some TV clips [early on] with Duane Eddy and James Burton and stuff, how are we to know from that kind of formal delivery, very neatly done, that we would end up as a particularly far-out, loose band, quite funky and extending all our songs? I think that’s the thing. We just grew more and more into a new place, and that’s what gave us the impetus to try this again.
Plant also spoke about the experience of singing the Led Zeppelin classic Stairway To Heaven at a charity event last year, “It was cathartic. People go, ‘Oh, that’s good. He never was going to do that.; But I didn’t really do it! I just blurted it out. ‘Cos it’s such an important song to me for where I was at the time and where I was with Jimmy and with John and Bonzo. So on that night, it was what it was. It was a trial by fire, but I felt better at the end than at the beginning.
When asked about the future of their collaboration, Krauss was enthusiastic, “We have had such a great time making those records and touring that I’d love to see it happen again, too. I feel like we’ve made something new when we recorded together. The whole thing has been a surprise for me. And I know it was for Robert too, although he seems to have more bravery in this department.”
Plant added, “Doing gigs is doing gigs, but actually making magic in the room is the only way you get to a gig. Once you’ve got it, you can’t really blow it out of the water unless you have a real difference in personality. We don’t have that because we laugh at each other, but underneath it all there’s a lot of love and a strong affinity. It’s good. It’s really good.”