In 2007, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss released Raising Sand, one of the most acclaimed albums of the 21st century. It was an unlikely, mesmerizing pairing of one of rock's greatest frontmen with one of country's music's finest and most honored artists, produced by the legendary T Bone Burnett. Now, after 14 years, they return with a dozen songs from a range of traditions and styles that extend this remarkable collaboration in new and thrilling directions....

The album is his first truly solo album: just Thile, his voice, and his mandolin, on new recordings of six original songs and three covers, all of which contextualize and banter with his ideas about spirituality. Recorded in a converted upstate New York church during the pandemic, its centerpiece is the three-part Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth, which was inspired by C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. The album also features a song Thile wrote...

From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, a steady stream of Scots migrated to Ulster and eventually onward across the Atlantic to resettle in the United States. Many of these Scots-Irish immigrants made their way into the mountains of the southern Appalachian region. They brought with them a wealth of traditional ballads and tunes from the British Isles and Ireland, a carrying stream that merged with sounds and songs of English, German,...