"Gone Gone Gone" is my ability to stop listening to this Alison Krauss and Robert Plant jam.

Apologies for the delayed post, lovely followers! I've been busy preparing one of my own creations for its premiere next Monday. Today's post is on this amazing bluegrass fusion song from an album that I am obsessed with, to say the very least.

Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, photo courtesy of Idolator.com

Even though I grew up listening to a wide variety of music, I never really listened to any bluegrass music. As many of you will know, bluegrass made a huge comeback with the movie O Brother Where Art Thou in 2000. The song "Man of Constant Sorrow" (which George Clooney did not sing - in fact, it was Dan Tyminski, who is in the group Union Station who usually tour with Alison Krauss) reached #35 on the Billboard country chart, even though it received almost no airplay on the radio. The song "I'll Fly Away" in the film was performed by Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch on the soundtrack cd.

I got into bluegrass about 2 years ago when Sarah and I were having a lively discussion about music. When I told her I didn't know any bluegrass outside the popular film, she stared at me in total disbelief, shook her head, and proceeded to lend me this album as well as another. I was hooked. I didn't listen to anything else for at least a month. I wandered through crowds with my headphones on, unable to hear people yelling at me to watch out for that grocery cart that was headed straight for my shins. In my caffeine fueled obsession enthusiasm I discovered many amazing ensembles and bands, and I also developed an affinity for the banjo.

I spent a good 4 days trying to decide which song from the album to feature, and I finally settled on this one. I cannot in good conscience let you click away from this article without emphatically begging you to listen to the entire album, because it is all pure gold. Take a listen to "Gone Gone Gone."

Surprised, right? What an unlikely duo - a well known bluegrass singer with a clear voice and mad fiddle skills meets a rocker best known for being the lead singer of Led Zeppelin. Yet somehow, it works. No, more than works - it jams. This is the absolute epitome of feel good jamming music. This is the perfect song to drive down the interstate to, possibly after you just left your partner of five years, laughing hysterically because you are now, indeed, gone.

Though the lyrics are not deep, they have a simplicity that mirrors that of popular music. This text meshes the storytelling tradition of bluegrass music with the catchy short ideas of pop and rock and roll. The fact that their voices blend extraordinarily well is an added bonus, and one of the reasons that this album swept the Grammys. They won every award they were nominated for (Best Comtemporary Folk/Americana Album, Album of the Year, Record of the Year (for the song Please Read the Letter), Best Pop Vocal Collaboration (Rich Woman), and Best Country Collaboration with Vocals (Killing the Blues)). That's a grad total of 5 Grammys for one album - impressive for any genre, but absolutely astounding for bluegrass.

Without going into too much musical jargon, this song marries the simplicity of a bluegrass chord structure and simple melody with the slightly obscured sound of a jazz chord voicing. To put it simply, a jazz chord adds pitches that "don't belong" in the chord according to traditional old white men with weird wigs Mozart (and earlier) era music. The anatomy of a jazz chord is astoundingly complex and simple at the same time. Many jazz musicians are fluent in these styles and tend to blow "classically trained" vocalists out of the water in orchestration and arranging class. The addition of these jazz chords in this song adds volume and meat to a song that is interesting in its own right, but becomes phenomenal when this fusion is applied.

Writing fusion is difficult. It can be hard to marry styles that seem like a cheap vinaigrette dressing, but if the right person shakes it up, you've got yourself a salad that tastes like a chef on the Food Network made it. Sometimes, fusion flops - this can be for any number of reasons - but this combination of bluegrass and jazz is so delectable that it overshadows the cake you just saw on Ace of Cakes. Sure, cake is good - but music is forever.