Alison Krauss: Forget About It : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Alison Krauss' seventh album finds her moving from progressive bluegrass toward a kind of artful pop with folk-country instrumentation. Forget About It is a personal piece of work that unfolds as a series of wistful, almost whispered ruminations on a broken relationship. It's lovely in a rueful, melancholy way, hanging together as a meditation on an aftermath that calls to mind Neil Young's masterly Comes a Time, with the essential difference being that Young is a songwriter and Krauss a song finder. While Krauss' vocals are uniformly exquisite in their tremulous, pearly intimacy, some of the sources (Michael McDonald, Shenandoah) and selections (Todd Rundgren's "It Wouldn't Have Made Any Difference") broaden Krauss' stylistic palette but don't add anything to her talent. Still, the album coheres around its theme of romantic lamentation; the title track, "Could You Lie," and several other pop-bluegrass mergings are redolent of freshness and growth. (RS 819)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH