Songfacts®:

• "Please Read the Letter" is a moving plea for understanding at the end of a relationship. It originally appeared on Robert Plant and Jimmy Page's 1998 album Walking Into Clarksdale and it was Raising Sand's producer T-Bone Burnett who added this to the album's track list. Plant explained to msn.com: "T-Bone is fantastic, a legend. He put ['Please Read The Letter'] on his list but I must have sent it to him because T Bone would never have subscribed to that era of music. So he said 'Ok, I get it [Zeppelin] now, it's a twilight band. I think he was into Jimmy [Page]'s guitar because T-Bone is a guitarist and Pagey has a sort of international exotica, he can go into those dark places. Whatever, it's a song that hadn't reached its true potential before. Now it's become something else."
• Both Krauss and Plant achieved their highest-ranking albums in the Billboard 200 chart under their own names with Raising Sand. It overtook Krauss's placing for her earlier 2007 album A Hundred Miles or More: A Collection, which reached #10. Plant 's highest-ranking solo title had been the #4 peak of No Quarter in 1994. Ten years prior to that he's also reached #4 with Volume One, a one-off side project by the Honeydrippers. Of course, Plant had been to the top of The Billboard 200 seven times as a member of Led Zeppelin.
• This won for Record of the Year at the Grammy Awards in 2009. Accepting the award, Robert Plant said: "When we started this project together, the whole game was a mystery. We gave ourselves three days, and we said if it doesn't work, we'll just take lunch, and I'll go back to Wolverhampton. But we brought this song out and it's been given that Nashville touch and it feels pretty good."