Sound team for Plant/Krauss tour wins award; Plant sits out as Rounder label honored

Congratulations go out to the people responsible for the sound on last year's Raising Sand tour by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

The sound team picked up the Outstanding Creative Achievement award for Tour Sound Production, presented by the Mix Foundation for Excellence in Audio at its 25th annual TEC Awards ceremony, held in New York on Saturday, Oct. 10.

LedZeppelinNews.com caught up with Plant's longtime sound engineer, Roy Williams, on tour last year.

Last October, T Bone Burnett won a TEC award for his production of Raising Sand, the Plant/Krauss album, and both singers were on hand to speak poetically in tribute to him. The situation one year later is different as a stalled project for a second Plant/Krauss album is in limbo, with Burnett's continued participation in it even in doubt and, now, Plant's relationship with the Rounder Records label possibly strained.

Hours ago, Krauss performed with her band, Union Station, at a Nashvile reception honoring Rounder's 40th anniversary. As The Tennessean recently reported), Rounder has been her label for almost a quarter of a century.

Nicole Keiper of The Tennessean reports in her Oct. 7 profile on Krauss that she and Plant "are in pre-production for a second set, Krauss says, but don't yet have a release timeframe."

So, not much has changed in the album's status -- or at least Krauss's terminology -- since she and Plant were in a studio together in January and Krauss insisted at the time that they were in "pre-production" for their Raising Sand follow-up.

Plant, who was spotted in California the past two weeks in a row, did not attend the Rounder reception.

By Friday night, he was back in England to attend a concert in Bristol by Egyptian percussionist Hossam Ramzy, who played on Unledded with Plant and Jimmy Page -- credit goes to Annie Hollinshead for the info about Plant's whereabouts on Oct. 9.

Isn't it odd for such a top-selling artist not to attend his own label's anniversary gala? It makes one question what the truth really is regarding their current work for Rounder.