Robert Plant and Alison Krauss: ‘When we get it right… we just look at each other and laugh’

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “It really felt like we’d probably record again,” Krauss says of the lengthy gap between Raising Sand and the pair’s equally noir and engrossing new album Raise the Roof. It’s given me a lot of spirit and heart, and also a whole different way of looking at the deal that I’m in Robert Plant He became freshly fascinated by the arrival of the earliest punk acts, “born out of a new generation taking things really back to basics” to challenge “the self-indulgence of the late Seventies”. “It was another great revelation of how charming and magnificent these other great portals are as they swing open – it was endless, looking in there… It’s given me a lot of spirit and heart, and also a whole different way of looking at the deal that I’m in.” The private and introvert Krauss, meanwhile, gained a fresh appreciation for her life as a musician: “You get wrapped up in the process of doing what you do and oftentimes you forget just how special it is.” But she also found herself fretting over the future of the bluegrass scene, and America itself. You think about the people that were around when we first put Zeppelin together, for all the madnesses and exaggerations, it was a part of the time that we were in and I really feel that we probably over-egged it a little bit, to say the least, but Jesus Christ it was very exciting… We were a law unto ourselves.” The Robert Plant and Alison Krauss of 2021, now 73 and 50 respectively, don’t foresee quite such a monumental gap between their second and any potential third album together, following a tour for the album next year.