Alison Krauss songwriting not an issue

Alison Krauss doesn’t worry about songwriting.

The singer who has won 27 Grammy Awards, more than any other woman in history says she doesn’t want to emulate Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton by writing her own material.

Krauss covers the Richard Thompson masterpiece Dimming Of The Day on her new album Paper Airplane.

“It’s not that I have resisted songwriting, it’s just not something I felt I have had to do,” she said.

“I’ve just not woken up and thought, I must do this. But I have often heard music that I have instantly felt ‘I have to sing that song’.

“I’ve never met Richard Thompson but I heard the song from T-Bone Burnett when we were working on the second version of Raising Sand.

“When I heard the song, I thought ‘Oh, I can’t take that on. Oh, I can’t. But T-Bone said ‘give it a shot’. We moved on to another project but I kept thinking about the song and how I could make it OK. Then I thought, well nobody has done a bluegrass version so we tried making it more sparse.

“I just think it is one of the greatest songs for a woman to sing. Not that it wouldn’t work for a man but the way the story is told and the way that Linda Thompson used to sing it out there, well I couldn’t deal with the emotion of it. I would think about Linda being sad when I was singing and listening and then I would get sad.I have also just recorded it for a new Transatlantic Sessions and we had a beautiful fiddle player and I would look at her and think what if she’s sad and we’d get into this whole kinda routine.

“I don’t know any woman who doesn’t react to that song the way I have. It’s just the purest, most clearly stated story about that place where a woman has lost love and where you don’t ever want to admit to being that broken. You want to have some pride left and the fact that the woman in the song is so stretched and has let go of her pride but will still say all the things that are so important to her. That moves me so much.”