Robert Plant & Alison Krauss vs. Bert Jansch

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss cover Bert Jansch's "It Don't Bother Me" for their new Raise The Roof album out Nov 19th.

Here's the scoop...

On November 19, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss return with their new album Raise The Roof, delivering a fresh, cosmic collision of early blues, country deep cuts, revolutionary folk-rock and lost soul music written by a dozen legends and unsung heroes of the past century. The long-awaited reunion marks the duo’s first record in 14 years, produced by T Bone Burnett, and the track list reflects both deep-rooted influences and recent revelations. 

On It Don’t Bother Me, the final preview of the album, the two artists transform Bert Jansch’s solo acoustic composition into an empowering arrangement led by Alison Krauss, simmering with spectral flourishes of dolceola, marxophone and pedal steel, handclaps and percussion, and interplaying guitars of Marc Ribot and Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo. Listen to Robert and Alison's update of "It Don’t Bother Me" below followed by Bert Jansch's original version from 1965 below.

 

On the inclusion of It Don’t Bother Me on Raise The Roof, Robert Plant says, “I’ve been a big follower of Bert Jansch’s work since I was a teenager, and of that whole Irish, Scottish, English folk style that has a different lilt and different lyrical perspective. I was very keen to bring some of that into the picture.”

 

“One of my favorite parts of this is the songs and songwriters that I had never heard of,” adds Alison Krauss. “Working with Robert, and with T Bone, is always a great education in music history.”

 

It Don’t Bother Me arrives on the heels of Raise The Roof’s lead single, Can’t Let Go, which just spent 10 consecutive weeks at #1 on the Americana radio charts, as well as the album’s sole original song, High and Lonesome, penned by Robert Plant and T Bone Burnett. 

 

Following the monumental debut of 2007’s platinum-certified Raising Sand, which won all six GRAMMY Awards for which it was nominated (including Album and Record of the Year), Robert Plant and Alison Krauss “are still proof that sometimes the best things come from unlikely collaborators” (Entertainment Weekly). Across Raise The Roof, the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer and 27x GRAMMY-winning Bluegrass Hall of Famer step further outside their comfort zone, expanding their unexpected, unparalleled partnership in remarkable new directions. 

 

While sessions for the album began in Nashville in November 2019, wrapping just weeks before the world went into lockdown, Krauss remembers sending Plant the Randy Weeks/Lucinda Williams classic, Can’t Let Go, at least 10 years ago - and “it seems like time hasn’t passed at all” (NPR Music). Elsewhere on Raise The Roof, Plant and Krauss reimagine songs from Merle Haggard, Allen Toussaint, The Everly Brothers, Anne Briggs, Geeshie Wiley, Ola Belle Reed, Brenda Burns and more, with arrangements even more evocative and hypnotic than those on Raising Sand.

Pre-order Raise The Roof right here. Listen to both versions of  "It Don't Bother Me" below.