When Now That I’ve Found You: A Collection first arrived in 1995, Alison Krauss was already a rising force in the bluegrass world. But few could have predicted just how profoundly this compilation would alter the course of her career and the perception of bluegrass itself. Compiled when she was just 23, the album works both as a retrospective and a springboard. Drawing from her formative solo work, her landmark recordings with Union Station, and her collaborations with The Cox Family and others, the collection sketches the arc of a prodigy coming into her own. Now reissued on vinyl for the first time by Craft Recordings, this double-Platinum album remains a graceful testament to Krauss’s early evolution as a singer, fiddler, and band leader.
The album opens with “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You,” a cover of The Foundations’ ’60s soul hit reimagined here as a hushed country ballad. Krauss’s voice is pure, direct, and emotionally unforced as it cuts through the arrangement with disarming clarity. That same quiet power threads through the rest of the album, whether she’s singing traditional gospel songs like “When God Dips His Pen of Love in My Heart”, reinventing classic rock on covers of Bad Company’s “Oh, Atlanta” and “Broadway”, or interpreting the Beatles’ “I Will” with soft-spoken conviction. Perhaps the most widely recognized moment is “When You Say Nothing at All,” a Keith Whitley tribute that became an unexpected radio smash and a career-defining hit. Krauss never oversells the lyric, instead leaning into its stillness, creating a version that feels both timeless and unguarded. It’s a performance that helped crack open commercial country to a more acoustic, roots-based sound in the mid-’90s. Elsewhere, deep cuts like “Sleep On” and “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby” showcase the seamless blend of bluegrass instrumentation and pop-adjacent songwriting that Krauss was quietly mastering before the term “Americana” gained mainstream traction. With Union Station and trusted collaborators like Jerry Douglas behind her, the musicianship is impeccable throughout, but never flashy.
What’s striking about revisiting this collection three decades later is how forward-thinking it feels. Rather than leaning heavily on tradition for tradition’s sake, Now That I’ve Found You frames bluegrass as a living, breathing idiom that is capable of absorbing gospel, folk, rock, and pop without sacrificing its identity. Krauss didn’t just find a wider audience with this record; she brought a new openness to a genre that had often been closed off to innovation.
The fact that it is available on vinyl again adds new depth to the listening experience as you can really appreciate every note that comes from the clean sounding vinyl. This anniversary reissue offers a chance to reappreciate the album that changed everything. For longtime fans, it’s a reminder of Krauss’s quiet genius. For newcomers, it remains a perfect entry point into one of the most distinguished voices in American roots music.
