Grammy-winning recording artist Alison Krauss will be stopping in Cincinnati with Union Station, touring behind their latest album – and first in fourteen years – Arcadia. Krauss has stayed plenty busy in the interim, recording the wildly successful and award-sweeping record Raising Sand with rock royalty Robert Plant, who she collaborated with once more for 2021’s Raise the Roof, as well as releasing the well-received solo album Windy City in 2017.
After overcoming a brief battle with dysphonia, a condition that affects the vocal cords, Krauss decided it was time to get the band back together and cut an album of songs she had collected over the intervening years. Noticeably absent, though, is Union Station’s longtime vocalist Dan Tyminski, who announced his departure last year. Bluegrass veteran Russell Moore has since stepped in to perform vocal duties. Additionally, the band will be accompanied by fiddler Stuart Duncan for live performances.
Sonically, Arcadia is a darker record – all but two songs are in minor keys – that hints at the current state of our country. Particularly in the song “The Hangman,” about the coming of fascism, lines like, “Innocent though we were, with dread/We passed those eyes of buckshot lead/Till one cried: ‘Hangman, who is he /For whom you raise the gallows-tree?’” pointing to the moral ambiguity of our current political leaders. Other songs tackle such weighty and tragic themes like a Civil War soldier’s last words, and in “Granite Mills,” an 1874 fire in a textile mill where 23 lives were lost, most of them children.
As Krauss told the New York Times, Union Station songs are “survival stories.” “Someone survived to tell them,” Krauss says, “so for me, these sad songs are very encouraging. They’ve told someone’s story and that’s how we are going to remember them forever. Whatever the situation was, it’s over. And you’ve gotten through it.” No matter how broken things may seem, there is still hope to be found. Or, as Leonard Cohen famously put it: “There is a crack/A crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”
Alison Krauss and Union Station play Riverbend Music Center on June 3 at 8 p.m. More info: riverbend.org.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s May 28 print edition.
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 10, 2025.