I've already pre-ordered this album, sounds intriguing.
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.Any album that covers Townes Van Zandt and Allen Toussaint is worth a listen.
[snip]
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.”
[From When It Takes Three People to Make a Duet]
Good afternoon. It is funny this snippet of an article considers Americana forgotten. I have just read a CNN posting on how cool it was, offering examples, etc. The article was on "USA still cool" or something which led me to think our image abroad was still cool, miraculously. Then I opened the link and found out it was about bluegrass, fiddles, etc.
The title of the subject matter was a ruse. We are still uncool abroad. Sniff :(
Politically, for sure, the US is very uncool abroad. As far as pop culture, the entertainment industry is one of the few economic categories where the trade imbalance is in America's favor (more film, music, television exported then imported).
Oh, and Americana music has always been slightly out-of-style, and slightly hip. His Bobness clutched his copy of the American Anthology of Folk Music like it was a talisman as he stomped around Greenwich Village in the Kennedy years.
I was just talking to my friend who went to the U of T at Austin. She concurred with you. Right now I am waiting for prints for the peanut gallery. Nic messed around with my browsers; it's a mess. I rewrote my post of today and would very much like you to read it. When you have *time* -- that precious commodity. Just to see how the ball bounces, it's Alain Toussant and Elvis Costello spinning here.