‘When we first sang… I could hear magic,’ says David Rawlings on partnership with Gillian Welch
WHEN Gillian Welch and David Rawlings sing together, it feels as if our hectic world stops turning.
Their sublime blend of voice and acoustic guitar belongs to bygone, simpler times.
By drawing on traditional folk, bluegrass and country, they join the dots between old-time Appalachian music and the 21st Century.
Their songs have the stamp of authenticity but, at the same time, they are not afraid to allow in contemporary influences from the artists they grew up listening to.
There are echoes of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons, Townes Van Zandt, Grateful Dead and two songwriters who became their close friends but are sadly no longer with us, Guy Clark and John Prine.
Today, Gillian (pronounced with a hard G), 57, and David, 54, are established as one of the most revered acts from that vast, unwieldy pool which we conveniently call Americana.
Their new album Woodland ranks as a crowning achievement, such is its grace, power and beauty.
It might just be the perfect antidote to that noisy, sandy-haired President elect!
Since meeting at Berklee College Of Music in Boston at the turn of the Nineties, Welch and Rawlings have ploughed their own furrow, untroubled by prevailing trends.
Welch well remembers her first encounters with Rawlings, how they bonded over old records by bluegrass trailblazers The Stanley Brothers.
But she insists that there was no epiphany, that their potential as a musical duo took a while to reveal itself.
‘Uncanny alignment of likes and dislikes’
“There were little indicators,” she tells me during our Zoom call. “The sky didn’t open up and a ray of golden light shine down. There were no bells ringing out.
“But I have a vivid memory that, from the very beginning, we always liked the same things.
“If we were listening to a Stanley Brothers record, we would like the same moment in the same song. We would both respond to a particular word.
“It was an uncanny and profound alignment of likes and dislikes.”
Welch says their partnership started in earnest when they decamped to Tennessee’s Music City to further their ambitions.
She says: “We both made the commitment to move to Nashville in the summer of ’92.
“I beat Dave by two weeks because he had to give notice to the band he was playing in.”
Welch continues: “I remember going over to his little house and we were sitting in his kitchen.
“We sang and played [country ballad] Long Black Veil, just the two of us — the first time we’d heard ‘the duet’.
“We stopped and we both said, ‘Wow, that was pretty good.’”
Though I’m speaking to Rawlings on a separate call, his memories chime with Welch, just like their music.
“I could hear the magic,” he says of that fateful two-hour encounter in a tiny kitchen in a rented house.
“We were also interested in working with two guitars, like the brother teams of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties, trying to get as much texture as we could.”
Rawlings is referencing the aforementioned Stanley Brothers and other notable acts of the period such as The Louvin Brothers, The Delmore Brothers and The Blue Sky Boys.
We are very fortunate that we became a self-contained unit. Even with the writing, when Gill and I work on stuff together, it feels like we get to a different place.
David Rawlings
In their early days, he noticed that when he and Welch played with other people, “we lost something”.
He recalls that her debut album Revival, produced by T Bone Burnett, “had some of the best players, people I am honoured to have worked with”.
“But, at the end of the day, my favourite cut is probably Annabelle, which is this mono recording of us doing what we do.
“That gave us something to lean into for a long time.”
Looking back over the 28 years since Revival appeared, Rawlings adds: “We are very fortunate that we became a self-contained unit.
“Even with the writing, when Gill and I work on stuff together, it feels like we get to a different place.”
This enduring double act has released five Gillian Welch albums, one David Rawlings album and two by Dave Rawlings Machine.
Welch achieved wider recognition in 2000 when she sang with Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss on the wildly successful and Grammy-winning soundtrack album for O Brother, Where Art Thou?
But they are not ones to rush things. The last Welch album was 2011’s The Harrow & The Harvest and the last by Rawlings was 2017’s Poor David’s Almanack.
Then, in 2020 at the height of Covid, the pair recorded a covers collection under BOTH their names, All The Good Times (Are Past & Gone).
It included a smattering of traditional folk songs, Prine’s Hello In There and two deep Dylan cuts, Señor and Abandoned Love — and it made them realise that they deserved equal billing.
Now we have the beautifully realised Woodland, their first album of original songs credited to Gillian Welch & David Rawlings.
It is named after their studio in Nashville which was nearly destroyed by a devastating tornado in 2020. It took them more two years to rebuild it.
Welch picks up the story: “The tornado hit the building in the middle of the night.
“It tore the roof off and then it rained for eight hours — oh my goodness!
She says she and Rawlings were lucky to have been at home because they “managed to save everything”.
“We might have lost all our instruments, equipment and master tapes. Our entire career, 30 years of music, would have been gone.”
The traumatic event not only impacted on their lives but also on their songwriting and the creation of the Woodland album, as Welch explains.
“What really made the record was our response to the tornado. The thought of losing everything lodged in our brains.
“We were thinking, ‘What is this all for? Maybe the things you think are permanent, are not.’”
Rawlings describes what it was like working in the aftermath of the storm.
“The building was in such a horrible state that we could only manage to play for an hour or so in the day,” he says. “The rest of the time was damage control.”
He adds that work on recording the album even “stopped at a certain point. Rebuilding the room became an all-consuming thing.”
‘Learned the ropes from Guy Clark’
But there’s no doubting that Woodland is worth the wait.
A glance down the tracklist finds a song title which stands out, Hashtag, a remarkably modern-sounding addition for purveyors of such timeless music.
Sung tenderly by Rawlings, it serves as a touching tribute to their late friend and mentor, Guy Clark, the Texan singer known for masterful songs like LA Freeway and Desperados Waiting For A Train.
Welch says Hashtag was inspired by the moment on the morning of May 17, 2016, that she realised Clark had died.
“I checked my phone, as we do in this day and age, and I saw #guyclark. My stomach turned over and I felt sick because I knew it meant only one thing.”
The song explores the transitory nature of life in the context of losing someone dear and includes the telling line, “Singers like you and I are only news when we die.”
Welch says of Clark: “He was our mentor. Two years before we had our first record, when we were just kids, he took us on the road, opening his show.
“We learned the ropes from him. It was like troubadour school. He could be prickly but also very generous. It meant a lot to us because he didn’t abide fools at all.”
Welch recalls that Clark would hang out with her and Rawlings after the shows, “giving us that little bit of confidence when we needed it”.
Rawlings also has fond memories of Clark, who brought a poet’s touch to his songwriting and fine craftsmanship to making his own guitars. Guy had a wry outlook on life and music,” he says. “But he had great commitment to his work.”
As it was her idea, he expected Welch to sing Hashtag but somehow his work tape, which he’d sung into his phone, hit the mark perfectly.
“At one point, you can even hear Gill doing the laundry in the other room,” he laughs.
Though written before the pandemic, the line in Hashtag, “Caught it like a new form of the flu”, brings to Rawlings’ mind another departed friend, John Prine, who died from Covid.
“It was crushing,” he says. “We were so close to John, one of those people you just want to live up to.
“Maybe through the tornado, through Covid and through being older yourself, you start to appreciate themes of mortality, the transitory nature of everything you do.”
For a moment, I couldn’t tell if the train or the sky was moving. Maybe it was a trick of the light and an empty boxcar but it was very arresting.
Gillian Welch
Before I finish talking to Welch and Rawlings, we rattle through some of the other treasures to be found on their Woodland album.
Of the yearning, scene-setting opening track, Empty Trainload Of Sky, Welch says: “I was taking a walk down by the big old trestle [bridge] that goes over the Cumberland River, right by my house.”
As the afternoon freight train rumbled across, she had a “weird vision”.
“For a moment, I couldn’t tell if the train or the sky was moving. Maybe it was a trick of the light and an empty boxcar but it was very arresting.
“I sat down on a park bench right there and didn’t get up until I had the first verse. The song became the cornerstone of the album.”
Lawman is one of the album’s older efforts, marked out by Rawlings’ gorgeous guitar lick and Welch’s richly atmospheric vocals.
“We even performed it once at the Newport Folk Festival many years ago,” says Welch. “Same song title but completely different.
“We were never satisfied with it so we set it aside for years until we finally figured it out.”
Turf The Gambler evokes the sparse storytelling vibe of Bob Dylan’s 1967 album John Wesley Harding.
Rawlings says: “I’ve always loved those little three-verse, extra cryptic story songs.”
He senses that few people are writing them these days but, at his age, he thought: “Why not?”
“Earlier in life, I probably wouldn’t have fiddled around with this type of thing but it’s a beautiful form so I decided to put the song together.”
‘Absurd to try to separate us’
There’s a rawness to Here Stands A Woman which benefits from one of Welch’s most affecting deliveries and references Dylan’s Just Like A Woman.
“It’s a sad song about life experiences, good or bad,” she affirms. “That is what makes us as people.
“In my experience, I’d rather be a woman than a girl.”
If most of the songs find either Welch or Rawlings singing lead and the other harmonising, two are notable for both taking the lead, the nostalgic What We Had, which harks back to Seventies soft-rock, and the intimate finale, Howdy Howdy.
“That’s why the album has to be under both our names,” says Welch. “It seemed absurd to try to separate us.”
I guess she’s saying what we already know. That Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are united in music — forever.