Alison Krauss & Union Station

From a fiddle contest to a band

Alison Krauss was born in Decatur, Illinois in 1971 and raised in Champaign. She began classical violin at five, switched to bluegrass fiddle after a county fair talent contest in 1979, and won the Walnut Valley Festival fiddle championship at thirteen. She signed to Rounder Records in 1985 and made her first solo album, Too Late to Cry, in 1987 at sixteen; that year she joined a band called Silver Rail, renamed Union Station by its bassist John Pennell, as her backing group.

The first Union Station album, Two Highways (1989), included a bluegrass cover of the Allman Brothers' "Midnight Rider". By Every Time You Say Goodbye, recorded at Homeplace Studios in Nashville and released on February 14, 1992, the line-up was Krauss, the banjoist and guitarist Ron Block, the bassist Barry Bales, the guitarist Tim Stafford and the mandolinist Adam Steffey, and it won the Grammy for best bluegrass album at the 1993 awards. Dan Tyminski took over guitar and mandolin, and So Long So Wrong (March 25, 1997) won three Grammys the next year, including best bluegrass album. Jerry Douglas joined on dobro in 1998.

The hit and the breakthrough

In 1994 the band recorded Keith Whitley's "When You Say Nothing at All" for a tribute album to Whitley. BNA sent it to radio in January 1995 after stations began playing it on their own, and it reached number three on the country chart and won the Country Music Association's single of the year. The compilation Now That I've Found You: A Collection (February 7, 1995) went double platinum in the United States. In 2000 Krauss and Tyminski appeared on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, credited with reviving public interest in bluegrass.

New Favorite (August 14, 2001) went gold and won the Grammy for best bluegrass album; Live, recorded at the Louisville Palace on April 29 and 30, 2002, went double platinum. Lonely Runs Both Ways (November 23, 2004) won three Grammys in 2006, including best country album. Krauss recorded Raising Sand with Robert Plant in 2007, and Paper Airplane (April 12, 2011), engineered by Mike Shipley, was the band's first country number one. Arcadia (March 28, 2025, Down the Road Records) was the first Union Station album in fourteen years; Tyminski left to concentrate on his own band and Russell Moore of IIIrd Tyme Out joined on the road and shares lead vocals. Krauss has won 27 Grammys.

Sound

The band plays bluegrass instrumentation, fiddle, banjo, guitar, mandolin, dobro and upright bass, but with a restraint unusual in the form: Rolling Stone said the group avoids hot-licks showboating, and the arrangements put the vocal first. Song choice does much of the work, from the Whitley ballad to songs by Robert Lee Castleman, Richard Thompson and Jackson Browne. Ron Block called Lonely Runs Both Ways pretty much what they have always done.