I am a film person.  I love film criticism, writing film reviews, I want to write movies.  Blah blah blah.  I am not a music person by nature – my taste is varied and I generally can’t articulate why I like the music I like.  I simply like it because I like it.

I mention this only because it should be telling how much I love Raising Sand, which won the Album of the Year Grammy this weekend.  I love the album for my normal reasons: it sounds pleasing to me.  But the album makes me think about the music critically.  It’s an ode to music traditions and influences like bluegrass and traditional country while simultaneously sounding wholly original and unlike anything I’ve heard before.

Also interesting is the way in which Plant and Krauss combine their vocals.  This isn’t really an album of duets, but an album where they’re both the collective lead singer.  Plant and Krauss both have a couple tracks where they take the solo line, but the rest of them feature the two in harmony, equally splitting songs where Plant is the dominant voice and Krauss is the dominant voice.

Standout tracks for me are “Killing the Blues,” “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us,” and the album closer “Your Long Journey” (that all of these feature Krauss is indicative of where my personal tastes laid before hearing the album).  A couple of the tracks sag a bit, but these tracks feature Plant, and my like-not-love assessment of them is probably heavily influenced by my love for Krauss.  Still, though, the album as a whole is damn good, more thoughtful than damn near most of the music I’ve heard in a long time.  A