NONESUCH Saving Grace [VINYL]

Robert Plant’s Saving Grace is the first album featuring a new band of distinguished players, which he calls “a song book of the lost and found”. The genesis of Saving Grace began during the lockdown in “The Shire”, when Plant’s customary wandering was all but forbidden. While his recent adventures have centred around Nashville, having reunited with Alison Krauss for 2021’s chart-topping, multi GRAMMY-nominated Raise The Roof, it was in the English countryside that Robert Plant connected closely to this diverse group of musicians, who through their own experiences had a shared lean towards his much-loved corners of evocative song. Together, Plant and Saving Grace – vocalist Suzi Dian, drummer Oli Jefferson, guitarist Tony Kelsey, banjo and string player Matt Worley, cellist Barney Morse-Brown – have spent the past six years growing into a wide-ranging workshop of styles and personalities, weaving through time and circumstance with joy and abandon. “We laugh a lot, really. I think that suits me. I like laughing,” Plant says. “You know, I can't find any reason to be too serious about anything. I'm not jaded. The sweetness of the whole thing… These are sweet people and they are playing out all the stuff that they could never get out before. They have become unique stylists and together they seem to have landed in a most interesting place.” Following his previous acclaimed releases on Nonesuch Records – 2014’s lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar and 2017’s Carry Fire – Saving Grace brings yet another chapter of Robert Plant’s ceaseless roar into the daylight. Produced by Robert Plant and Saving Grace – and recorded between April 2019 and January 2025 in the Cotswolds and on the Welsh Borders – Saving Grace breathes fresh life into a collection of century-old music. A treasury of songs featured back in time by Memphis Minnie, Bob Mosley (Moby Grape), Blind Willie Johnson, The Low Anthem, Martha Scanlan, Sarah Siskind, and Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk’s Low. After touring extensively across the UK and Europe in recent months and years, Robert Plant and Saving Grace will perform for the first time in the US this autumn, with an initial run of a dozen North American shows announced today. Dates include NYC’s Brooklyn Paramount, Port Chester’s Capitol Theatre, Chicago’s The Vic, Los Angeles’ United Theater and more.