NPR Music Listening Party: Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, 'Raise the Roof'

Join us in an online listening party for Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' first album together in 14 years, 'Raise the Roof.' With NPR Music critic and correspondent Ann Powers in the host chair, we'll feature a live conversation with the artists.

When Plant and Krauss first announced their debut collaboration more than a decade ago, eyebrows were raised. Here was Led Zeppelin's lead singer and a bluegrass-country singer/fiddler coming together for something subdued. "While 'Raising Sand' is indeed assiduously mannerly, mostly low-key and pretty," Ken Tucker said in his review for Fresh Air, "it's also starkly beautiful, with an undercurrent of bleak humor that makes a crucial difference in a collection of harmony songs like this."

'Raise the Roof' reignites that old spark, as the duo interprets songs by The Everly Brothers, Calexico, Allen Toussaint and Olla Belle Reed, in addition to one original tune, "High and Lonesome." The album is somehow quieter and more haunting than the first, but also deeper and more invested in music history.