For Alison Krauss, records are not just made. First, they must be inspired. “I just wait,” she says. “I just wait.” Eventually something, somehow, somewhere comes along, even if that first spark might later, to outside eyes, appear to have only the most mysterious connections to what it has inspired. But nothing will happen until it arrives, and so patience is required. “I never know till it gets there,” she says. “It just shows up.”
Over the years, these starting points have often been images. There are two paintings, for instance, on adjacent walls in the front room of her Nashville home. The larger is of some blossoming trees, a fence and a blast of green behind them, a picture that seems to carry within it some sense of hope and joy. The second is smaller and darker, and shows two wooden buildings. “This one doesn’t have any hope,” she explains. “Nothing good’s going to happen.” She’s made full use of both in the past, and in the way she describes it, it’s quite clear that each of these feelings - hope, and its absence – have been just as important as the other.
The mysterious thread that led to her new album, Windy City, began one day in London, several years ago, when she chanced upon a retrospective anthology of pictures by the photographer Bob Richardson. For the next two years, she kept returning to them. There was something about some of these pictures – mostly pictures of girls and women that felt like the Sixties but most importantly had a certain atmosphere or attitude about them - that she would keep returning to. Whatever precise effect they had on her, it percolated and percolated until, at last, she was ready.
“There’s just a certain thing that happens,” she explains. “It’s like a thing you know. It’s the truth. And it’s the beginning of knowing I’m going to record. That it’s time to work.”

Those photographs were one foundation upon which Windy City would be established. The other followed on from a more prosaic decision - that Alison Krauss would turn the working method she has followed for most of her creative life on its head. “Usually it’s just all songs first,” she says. “It was the first time I’d ever not had songs picked out, and it was just about a person.”
The person in question was the veteran Nashville producer and songwriter Buddy Cannon. She had always enjoyed the occasional sessions she’d found herself doing for him over the years, but something else happened when she came in to sing Hank Cochran’s “Make The World Go

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