By JON PARELES
LONDON
PERHAPS it was a coincidence that Robert Plant chose a Russian tearoom called Trojka, which means a threesome or triumvirate, to talk about his new duet album with Alison Krauss, “Raising Sand.” Or maybe it was a subliminal reminder that the album is really a three-way collaboration by an improbable alliance: Mr. Plant, who will be forever known as the lead singer of Led Zeppelin; Ms. Krauss, whose clear voice and deft fiddle style hail from Appalachia; and the producer and guitarist T Bone Burnett, the Texan who is best known for concocting haunted, pensively anachronistic Americana.
They represent three different musical spheres: Mr. Plant’s worldly hard rock, Ms. Krauss’s limpid update of rural traditions and Mr. Burnett’s rangy Texas twang. “Raising Sand” (Rounder), all three say, is like nothing any of them could have made on their own. But Mr. Burnett saw a link between the singers: “They’re two very mystical voices, and the blend of them is mystical,” he said in a telephone interview from his home and studio in Los Angeles. "They both sound like they’re singing from some other time. Alison sounds like she just stepped out of the Black Forest, and Robert sounds like Ozymandias,” the Egyptian pharaoh.
With Mr. Burnett leading a malleable studio band, Mr. Plant and Ms. Krauss share old and recent songs, drawing on Gene Clark, the Everly Brothers, Townes Van Zandt, Allen Toussaint, Mel Tillis and Tom Waits. It’s a collection of, mostly, sad songs — tales of love betrayed — floating in their own limbo. Together the collaborators triangulate a terra incognita somewhere between swamp and mountain, memories and eternity. Mr. Plant happily called it “the most amazing collision of styles.”
Sipping a latte and wearing a washed-out brown T-shirt that revealed robust biceps, Mr. Plant was far more eager to talk about “Raising Sand” than about the impending Led Zeppelin reunion. That concert is scheduled for Nov. 26 at the O2 arena in London as a benefit for a educational charity supported by Ahmet Ertegun, the chairman of Atlantic Records until his death last year. “It’s a one-night stand,” Mr. Plant said. “I’m taking emotional condoms.” Then he changed the subject.
Read more about this amazing musical pairing in the New York Times.
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