You’ve had this one for years, and you probably know exactly which shelf it’s on.
Maybe it came home from a used bin, maybe you bought it new because O Brother had just cracked the world open and bluegrass was briefly everywhere. Either way, it got played, got appreciated, and eventually got filed. Tonight, pull it back out. New Favorite — released in 2001 on Rounder Records — is one of those records that reveals more with every pass, assuming you’re willing to slow down enough to actually listen.
The Room It Was Made In
The sessions happened at Comet Recording in Nashville, engineered by Gary Paczosa, who has spent a career making acoustic instruments sound like they’re breathing in the same room as you. Paczosa’s fingerprints are all over this record in the best possible way — there’s almost no distance between you and the microphone placement. When Union Station plays, you hear wood and string and breath, not a simulation of those things.
The band on this record is the essential lineup. Dan Tyminski on guitar and tenor vocals, Ron Block on banjo, Barry Bales on upright bass, Jerry Douglas on dobro. That’s it. No string pads, no studio sweetener. What Bales does on the low end throughout this record is something most people float right past on casual listens — find a moment tonight where you can just follow the bass. It’s unhurried and deeply intelligent, like a conversation happening underneath the melody.
What You Probably Missed
The record opens with “The Lucky One,” and if you’ve heard it enough times it can slide right by you — it’s so well-executed it feels effortless. That’s the trick. Effortlessness is the hardest thing to manufacture, and what’s actually happening is a band at the absolute top of its game playing with complete control and zero showing off. The restraint is the performance.
Jerry Douglas is the one to watch, or rather to hear, on a close listen. His dobro playing operates as a second voice throughout, commenting and responding to Krauss in ways that feel almost conversational. On “Stitches & Burns” he’s doing something subtle in the turnarounds that I genuinely didn’t notice for the first dozen plays. It’s not showy. It just makes the song feel rounder, more complete.
Krauss herself — and this is an opinion, not a hedge — is simply one of the greatest singers this country has ever produced. The thing people sometimes say about her, that her voice is too perfect, too controlled, is exactly backwards. Listen to where she places the pitch against the chord on “Heartstrings.” There are choices in there that a less assured singer would never make, small inflectional moves that sound inevitable only because she sells them so completely.
Why Tonight
There’s something about putting this on after a long day that feels almost medicinal. Not because it’s background music — it isn’t, it won’t let you treat it that way if you’re paying attention — but because the tempo of the record matches the tempo you want to shift into. Nobody is in a hurry here.
Dan Tyminski’s lead on “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn” is the track I keep coming back to. He sings it old, the way good traditional singers age into their material rather than perform it. For a man who was probably in his mid-thirties at the time of the sessions, that kind of settled authority is something you can’t fake and can’t teach.
This album won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2002, and that fact probably made you like it slightly less, the way recognition always introduces a little suspicion. Ignore all that. It’s on your shelf because some version of you already knew what it was. Tonight, let the other version catch up.