In a Q&A with GMTV, singer-songwriter Jason Mraz was asked if he had met any of his idols. He talked about meeting Paul McCartney and Robert Plant:

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss I got to meet right before the Grammys and I got to stand in their presence and I didn’t really know what to say. He just talked about whether his leather jacket made him look gay.

Mark Guarino, writing for the Christian Science Monitor ponders the challenges of staying relevant as performers grow older. Guarino uses Robert Plant as an example and writes:

The unorthodox matchup that set the tone for this year is the one that paired former Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant with neo-bluegrass singer and fiddle player Alison Krauss. Their tour from last year was the summer’s most anticipated ticket and was voted “most creative tour package” by the concert industry magazine Pollstar. And their album resulted in five Grammy awards, including record of the year and album of the year.

Yet despite the project’s commercial rewards, it originated from an artistic leap of faith. After playing two reunion shows in London, Plant was under pressure to launch a Led Zeppelin reunion world tour, which was expected to smash box office records. But instead, he opted for playing vintage country, folk, and blues tunes with Krauss in mid-size theaters – a choice that yielded less revenue than would a blockbuster reunion tour, but ultimately generated something more valuable: artistic relevance.

Billboard.biz has an interview with IODA founder Kevin Arnold about digital music distribution. The Independent Online Distribution Alliance, founded in 2003, provides digital distribution for indie labels worldwide. Writer Cortney Harding asked about the boost in digital sales for Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Raising Sand after the Grammy wins. Arnold says:

That record has had an incredibly long shelf life, and it definitely shot back up the charts after the Grammys. It’s a record that’s sort of crept around and had legs for the longest time; it essentially just won’t go away, and the whole goal there is to get more and more people to discover it, so it’s good that digital can play a role in all of that.

Tech heads might be interested in the Shure Microphone presence at the Grammy awards. InfoComm International gives a rundown, including what Robert Plant and Alison Krauss were singing into:

Not to be overlooked or under-heard in this year’s GRAMMY microphone milieu was Shure’s venerable hardwired SM58, which found a place in front of Alison Krauss and Robert Plant (whose album Raising Sand won five awards before the night was out) and was the choice of Stevie Wonder.

Paul Zollo writes on American Songwriter about his experiences and interviews while covering the 2009 Grammy Awards. He shares some backstage comments from Robert Plant:

[Plant] said his album with Krauss worked so well because “we come from such different places on the musical map. I came from a British approach to the great songs from America – to spectacular Black Americana. And Alison has patiently shown me much of the America I was never exposed to before. There are so many thousands of beautiful songs in the air. And America needs to know what this music is about.” In his acceptance speech, he thanked Krauss for “teaching me to sing in straight lines.” T Bone said that the two artists succeeded so well because they came “to the studio with nothing on their minds by courage and love and freedom.” In his acceptance speech for Record of the Year, he said only, “Good things happen out of nowhere.”

Caroline Langston, writing in Image/Good Letters, thinks Robert Plant has an air of humility about him.

She writes in part:

The picture from the Grammys showed something even further, I think, which is that the face can reveal the results of a life lived with integrity. I don’t mean a life of virtue, necessarily. The smile on Plant’s face revealed a man that looked pretty jovial and happy: clearly, he was having a good time, something that was confirmed in the media reports I read. (You probably watched it, so please feel free to comment.)

What I saw in his open expression, though, was something you don’t often see in the faces of public figures—such as, say, Hank Paulson or Rod Blagojevich—a kind of clear-eyed self-acceptance of himself, and humility.

That’s it: the man looked humble. As though he were amazed to be standing where he stood.

That attitude was reflected in the remarks by Plant that I later read when I was continuing to mull over why that photograph had struck me so. Filled with praise for his Raising Sand partner Alison Krauss, Plant credited the album’s brilliance to the creative tension arising from the fact that he and Krauss “come from such different places on the map,” musically. He stated, roughly, that while his background with Led Zeppelin, like so many other English bands of the Sixties, had always led him to conceive of American music strictly in terms of the African-American musical experience—as in Delta blues and R+B—Krauss had introduced him to that other great strand that flows down through white Southern folk culture.

It was the statement of a keen mind betraying a willingness to learn, and wonder.

Read the entire article.

Don Jacobson, in Chicago’s Beachwood Reporter, blogs about why Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ big Grammy wins meant so much to him. He writes in part:

So, what have the Zep-man and the Bluegrass Babe really wrought by dominating the 2009 Grammys? Well, first of all, it has raised Robert Plant in my estimation even more, if such a thing is possible. He kicks ass for two reasons - number one, he’s got excellent taste in music. Anyone smart enough to realize the heir to hard, blues-based rock is modern Americana is damn cool in my book.

Read the article

Ben Sisario, writing in the New York Times, contrasts how Grammy wins this year garnered fewer traditional album sales than in years past. The article also points out the boost the wins had on digital music delivery, clearly pointing out that music distribution has changed dramatically.

Sisario writes:

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s “Raising Sand” (Rounder) took five awards at the Feb. 8 ceremony, including album of the year, and last week its sales increased 715 percent. That translates into total sales of 77,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan, enough to send the album to No. 2 on the latest Billboard chart.

By contrast, when the soundtrack to “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” won album of the year in 2002, it sold 209,000 copies the week after the awards.

“Raising Sand” made an impressive 27 percent of its sales as digital downloads, a rush that began the night of the awards, said Sheri Sands, Rounder’s general manager.

“On Sunday night from about 8 to midnight we sold 5,000 albums digitally,” she said. “And ‘Raising Sand’ went to the top of the charts on iTunes and No. 1 on Amazon.com.”

(Sales made on the night of the awards counted for last week’s chart.)

The Grammys seem to have inspired a lot of bloggers to contemplate the irrelevant notion of age. D.R. Scott’s Pulp Culture focuses in on rock culture for his take, using Robert Plant as an example of how to go about the business of aging. He writes:

And Robert Plant’s collaboration with the great bluegrass musician Allison Krauss won them five well-deserved Grammys for Raising Sand. Rock ‘n’ Roll stars do have second acts in their careers sometimes. Incredibly, unlike his greedy ex-bandmates, Plant didn’t want to lock himself inside a time machine and microwave stale Led Zeppelin leftovers anymore. Instead, the lead singer of The Greatest Rock Band In History chose to travel on the road less taken. Robert Plant had enough faith in himself to know that his experience would keep him from getting lost.

When an old fart takes on a new challenge and succeeds, that’s how you stay young, not plastic surgery or a supermodel girlfriend.

Sarah Rodman, writing for the Boston Globe (Rounder is based in Massachusetts), chronicles how Raising Sand will be a welcome boost for independent label Rounder Records. She writes:

Even Plant seemed to understand, praising Rounder from the Staples Center stage as “an independent label working against all sorts of stuff, which is terrible, but thank you.”

Last year, Rounder cut its staff from more than 100 employees to roughly 75, and at the time Nowlin (a Tufts grad like Irwin) admitted uncertainty about the label’s long-term future. “Keeping the record company alive is the main goal,” he said.

The remarkable success of “Raising Sand” should go a long way in doing that. Immediately after the awards, it flew to the top of the Amazon music rankings as well as several digital download sites. So far it’s sold over a million copies in the United States and another million worldwide.