Alison Krauss & Union Station - "Arcadia"

Honest nostalgia

I’m just gonna say it.

Alison Krauss is one of the best musical artists America has ever produced.

And we’ve got a lot of great musicians to claim.

But she’s faded out of the popular consciousness over the last few decades as Bluegrass, one of America’s great homegrown folk genres, has faded into “I hear banjos!” memes. And it’s a damn shame because she has the voice of a siren, sharp and clear as crystal.

Krauss got involved with the Bluegrass scene from a young age, learning to play the fiddle before she was ten with her mother’s encouragement, and entering competitions throughout her youth. She was just fifteen when she made her recording debut on an independent album in collaboration with Jim Hoiles and Swamp Weiss; the next year, she signed with Rounder Records and released a solo album.

Shortly after that, she joined Union Station, and the group dropped their debut album in 1989 when Alison was just 18 years old. That original lineup was comprised of Jeff White, Mike Harman, and John Pennell, but none of the three would remain for the group’s second album. Over the next several releases, as the 90s rolled on, the group would solidify their lineup:

• Larry Atamanuik – drums, percussion

• Ron Block – guitar, banjo

• Barry Bales – bass

• Jerry Douglas – dobro

• Dan Tyminski – guitar, mandolin, vocals

This lineup would remain stable until the band went on hiatus after 2011’s Paper Airplane. For the group’s return on Arcadia, their eighth studio album, there are two key changes:

1. Atamanuik is not with the band for this album; there is no percussion present on Arcadia.

2. Due to scheduling conflicts, Tyminski had to step back from this album, though he is still credited with some acoustic guitar and mandolin contributions. Vocal duties are instead shared with Russell Moore, a Bluegrass musician from Georgia best-known for his work with IIIrd Time Out.

And, credit where it’s due, Moore’s vocals on the songs he leads are phenomenal.¹ Krauss never truly outshines him.

And neither vocalist ever sticks out too far from the band behind them — the accompaniment is lush and complex at every turn. The melodies are catchy, but it’s the harmonies that are truly addictive here. I strongly recommend listening to this album with headphones on so you can really bury yourself in it and catch the intricacies.

The album’s title, Arcadia, carries a significant amount of cultural, historical, and metaphorical weight. “Arcadia” is:

• An idyllic province in Greece which became a poetic representation of the idyllic ideal

  • This idealization includes instances as early as the third century BCE by Theocritus, but is most notably exemplified by several artists, poets, and writers of the Renaissance.

• Subsequently, the name has been used for a conceptual Utopia which revels in pastoral simplicity

• In Greek Mythology, Arcadia was the home of Pan

• The etymological root of “Acadia”, an old name given to the American east coast stretching north from Virginia; over the centuries, the usage has narrowed and is most applicable to the smaller area of Maine and Nova Scotia, and Maine has an “Acadia National Park”.

Bluegrass, being an Appalachian Folk genre, is closely tied to a population who are frequently guilty of championing pastoral simplicity. So, for Krauss & Co., the notion of “Arcadia” is very close to home. And the band is old enough to remember the last vestiges of that simplicity before rapid modernization caught up with their neck of the woods.

But Arcadia isn’t driven by blind nostalgia. Krauss said in a statement, prior to the album’s release (and here reprinted by Billboard):

“The stories of the past are told in this music. It’s that whole idea of ‘in the good old days when times were bad.’ There’s so much bravery and valor and loyalty and dreaming, of family and themes of human existence that were told in a certain way when our grandparents were alive. Someone asked me, ‘How do you sing these tragic tunes? I have to. It’s a calling. I feel privileged to be a messenger of somebody else’s story. And I want to hear what happened.”

“Tragic tunes” is right — death is a frequent motif in Arcadia, with the first two tracks carrying the titles “Looks Like the End of the Road” and “The Hangman”, respectively. Track 4, “Granite Mills”, tells the tragic story of the Granite Mill fire of 1874 in which 23 ‘employees’ (read: mostly children) list their lives;² track 6, “Richmond on the James” tells of a Union soldier bleeding out and saying goodbye to a childhood friend outside of Richmond in the final days of the Civil War.

Somehow, even with all of this darkness, the album manages to end on a hopeful note with “There’s a Light Up Ahead”. It doesn’t say what the light is, leaving that up to interpretation.

Conflating the idealism of “Arcadia” with the harsh realities of life without the comforts that technological advancements have brought is a brilliant conceptualization. The execution could use a little more work, as not every song seems to have a point (at least, not one I’ve found yet).

Still, I love this album. It’s very solid and, if anything, needs a few more songs to flesh it out, as the runtime is only 35 minutes.

Rating: Blue

1. Of the album’s ten tracks, Moore sings lead on four of them: Tracks 2, 4, 7, & 9.

2. The song incorrectly embellishes this number to 300, which feels like a disservice to the 23 young lives lost in the real event. Nevertheless, the point that working conditions used to be a lot more dangerous in the ‘good old days’ still stands.