Brandon Ratcliff’s ‘Forget About It’ Cover Honors ‘Nashville Aunt’ Alison Krauss [Exclusive Video]
When up-and-comer Brandon Ratcliff moved to Nashville, he had a big-time name in his corner: Alison Krauss. Ratcliff's mother is Suzanne Cox, a member of the family bluegrass band the Cox Family, who have been around since the 1970s but worked closely with Krauss in the 1990s and 2000s.
"Alison Krauss was like a 'Nashville aunt' to me growing up. I usually saw her when my family played shows on the road with her or sang on something she was recording here in Nashville," Ratcliff tells The Boot. In fact, when Ratcliff first arrived in Music City, he lived with Krauss for about a year.
Ratcliff pays tribute to his "Nashville aunt" with a newly released cover of Krauss' song "Forget About It." The title track of Krauss' 1999 album, which reached the Top 5 on the Billboard country albums chart, "Forget About It" was also a charting single, though it peaked only in the high 60s.
"Alison helped me define the word 'artistry,'" Ratcliff muses. "Whether it was the way she talked about music or by just watching the way she was convicted by certain songs to make them hers, she taught me that you can be more than just a singer by owning your artistic fingerprint."
Listen to Brandon Ratcliff's "Forget About It" Cover
Robert Lee Castleman, who has also penned songs for, among others, Alan Jackson, wrote "Forget About It." The song's cadence and phrasing drew Ratcliff to the tune: "The lyrics are colorful and rapid-fire over the verse, and it opens up to the more strung-out melody in the chorus," he describes.
Ratcliff's version of "Forget About It" is part of his Uncovered series, which finds him covering three songs that influenced him; readers can get a look into his sessions for the song in the exclusive video at the top of this story. Ratcliff's other performances for the series include Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon" and Stevie Wonder's "Livin' for the City."
"The older I get, the more I realize that though we are very different stylistically, there’s also a common theme in the way we make music," Ratcliff says of his family and musical lineage. "My mom used to call an artist a 'stylist' if you could turn on the radio or a record and hear 3-5 seconds of a song and immediately know who it is. I think we both want to be that kind of artist: the kind that separates themselves from the crowd sonically, lyrically, musically and melodically."
Signed to Monument Records, Ratcliff released his debut single, "Rules of Breaking Up," in 2018. The song peaked just outside the Top 40 (No. 41) on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart.
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