Gillian Welch

Having said that this is nicely written piece. Hopefully I'll hear something from this record.

Agree that the individual decelerating etc. etc. is not especially radical per se, but the context in which Welch has presented this does in my view (trad.alt?) and the manner in which this is expressed do make it rather radical. Cf. Mike Skinner's parallel deconstruction/desecration/re-creation of UK garage. With Drake, you kind of know what you're going to get (Island '72 - narrowcast demographic). As you imply, I don't particularly want to push Welch into canonisation/Camden Town Good Music Society hell. I have tried to convince Simon R to have a listen but without much success so far - more intent on drawing a line from This Heat/ACR circa '80/81 to Streets/Position Normal.

I do tend to jump several stepping stones of logic at a go - including back and forth (as it tends to fit in better with the tenor of the music I'm talking about, getting beneath its skin etc.) - but really the data question is self-evident from my theory; the replicant in whom this data (country, USA, Titanic) has been implanted and who spends an hour trying to make it into a coherent story with palpable reason. I hope GW herself gets to read the piece; would love to know what gulf (or not) exists between my perception of what she's done and what she felt she set out to do.

Really the answer is to read the piece, in real time, along with the album (that's how I wrote the final draft - "24" style).

But what I would hope to do is to try and sharpen up ideas about the art of listening; about listening to the space between chords, the ethos which has been used to construct the music/lyric interface. To try to break the surface of "yawn trad country zzz" and get to the nerve centre of what is actually going on within this music. Something perhaps close to "the truth" - like the majestic yet immediately forlorn "perfect" opening chord of Vaughan Williams' Tallis Fantasia, which the rest of the piece tries hard to recapture before settling for a compromise; not quite perfection, not quite God, but as near as humanity is going to get, and we should be satisfied with that.

Thanks also for the red clay info - does, as you say, bring a whole new dimension to that song and its relationship to the rest of the album.

As for the red dirt, I took that as referring to the red dirt of Oklahoma and those kind areas. In that country the dirt really is red so what you've got, in my opinion, is a song about the insecurities of the poor country person toward the city tempered with a sense of defiance as though she's trying to stake a claim that her life is good enough and has value as is.

"Welch drifts _inexplicably_ into Steve Miller's "Quicksilver Girl" - itself as much of a virtual "folk song" as anything here."

It's not inexplicable; the lyrics set it up. "Quicksilver Girl" is the song the narrator is listening to while she's losing her virginity.

"Then there's "Red Clay Halo" the only song here whose lyrics have turned up on Welch websites, all about a poor lass who can't get a guy as she has to walk through red clay (why?) to attend the dance. Her gown will only become golden in the afterlife with a red clay halo around her head. This is not comfy Opry fare. "

Well, not exactly. First, it's about a lad, not a lass. "Well the girls all dance with the boys from the city, and they don't care to dance with me." It's about poverty, and a bittersweet fantasy about a heaven for the poor, where those who lived in the dirt have halos and wings made of dirt. As for comfy Opry fare...this song, written by Welch and Rawlings, was originally recorded in 1998 by the Nashville Bluegrass Band. It's a very traditional bluegrass song; poverty, squalor, and sadness are the oldest themes in country and bluegrass music, and have always and will always feature prominently on the Opry. Just a question, and not as pointed as it might appear: Have you ever listened to the Opry? It's easy to imagine what it's like if you haven't, but try listening to it some Saturday on the web. Welch and Rawlings have performed on the Opry a few times, themselves.

"The Opry audience whoops its approval of Rawlings' Scotty Moore licks in the middle. It's only when you realise that the track is extracted from the artfully engineered film "Down from the Mountain" that you understand that the audience is one which has seen "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" So they're all conspiring."

Well, this wasn't performed at the Opry. It was performed at the Ryman Auditorium, which is one of many former homes of the Opry; the Opry is now based, and has been for a long time, at The Grand Ole Opry House in the Disney-like Opryland complex, next to a terrifyingly gigantic shopping mall and chateau-like hotel. It's true that this cut is extracted from the "Down From the Mountain" concert, but it's not true that the audience has seen "O Brother"; the film was still in post-production at the time of the "Down From the Mountain" concert. The concert was simply a gathering of very earnest, straightforward musicians playing very earnest, straightforward music. If there is a hollywood sheen to the film of the concert, it's because the film was made by veteran showbiz documentary filmmakers...the same folks who filmed the Monterery Pop Fest, as well as Bowie's Spiders film and Depeche Mode's 101. Also, audiences whooping approval of guitar/mandolin/dobro/banjo/whatever solos is a bluegrass convention. It's just what's done at bluegrass concerts. I saw Welch and Rawlings recently in Nashville; Rawlings solo'd on every song, and received enthusiastic applause after every solo. He's a damn good guitar player, and deserves every clap. It's not conspiracy, or rebellion. It's all very conventional, traditional, and honest.

The impetus and meaning, incidentally, for "I Want to Sing that Rock N Roll, are here: "The song stems from comments made by Carter Stanley on a live album during the late-'50s' country-music slump, when rock and roll overshadowed everything else." http://www.thestranger.com/2001-12-06/guide2.html

The above link provides an overall excellent historical and interpretational view of this record.

"After that, a meditation on the consequences of wanting to sing that rock and roll. "Elvis Presley Blues." In the chorus it's unclear whether Welch is singing "I was thinking that night about Elvis - the day that he died" or "did he die?" She ponders his sexuality - "he grabbed his wand in the other hand and shook it like a hurricane ... and he shook it like a holy roller with his soul at stake." At the end of his life, "in long decline" he thinks "how happy John Henry was ... beating his steam drill and he dropped down dead." Welch climaxes with a murmured "bless my soul, what's wrong with me?" A tribute which Freddie Starr will never sing."

I kind of like your sexual interpretation here, but I'm afraid it's groundless. Although sexuality does play in here, it's not the point of the song. First, he's "Grabbing ONE in the other hand," not his wand; she's talking about the fusion of racial musical genres; black R&B with white country music. And John Henry is not "Beating his steam drill"...he did, however, defeat ("beat") a steam drill in a race to build a railroad, after which John Henry fell down dead. This is also the source of the lyric, "Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand." For more on John Henry, look here: http://www.ibiblio.org/john_henry/

"Bless my soul, what's wrong with me" is a brilliantly truncated extract from the Elvis track, "I'm all shook up." The entire lyric, which Welch has added to the song in live performance, is "Bless my soul, what's wrong with me/ I'm itchin like a bear on a fuzzy tree."

"It says fuck you far more fervently than Eminem taking the piss out of Steve Berman. "

Now THAT I can agree with!

"This is popular music which defies the undertaking. This is miles ahead. "

Thing is, though, this isn't popular music. It's pretty underground, by most American standard. The only Gillian you'll really hear on the radio is "I'll Fly Away" from the O Brother soundtrack. This music is miles and miles and miles behind, and miles ahead, and right on time. It overlaps old-time music with Woody Guthrie with Bob Dylan with The Stanley Brothers with Elvis with Blind Willie Johnson with Dead Kennedys with Kitty Wells with everything else. It's basically the whole history of RCA Studio B (Where it was recorded) all coming through at once. It's kind of ultimate postmodernism with all its machine noise turned down, so that the only noise is the noise of analogue tape, and yes, of fingers clicking on the strings.

I just wanted to add one little note for posterity's sake. The association of John in "I Dream a Highway" with John Henry is wrong. Like many of the other characters in this song, she's refering to a singer -- here Johnny Cash. Back when Johnny Cash was really screwed up on drugs and alcohol, he wreaked a little hell at the Grand Old Opry. At this show, he walked around the stage and kicked out the stage lights. The audience and the powers that be at the Grand Old Opry freaked and Mr. Cash was banned from the Grand Old Opry for many years.

She does go on to tie Johnny Cash in with John Henry in her reference to the hammer, but her initial reference is explicitly referring to the former.

Nothing as erudite as all the musings upthread. Just wanted to note that Gillian & David's cover of Black Star is excellent.

Yeah, they did that when I saw them live and it was quite striking

No album in four years though and no current tours.

lazy zing x 1000, and yet...

http://media.npr.org/images/podcasts/primary/npr_music_image_300.jpg

thanks for the pointer to the WFUV - Bonnaroo interview. Sounds like they are at least starting to pull together some new material.

I love Soul Journey as a deliberate full album, how the final lines rhyme "mall" (mall!) and "ball" and refer to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and how they've got electric guitars for the first time in this song, and it feels like the end of a two-album or maybe four-album song cycle.

Also I love how each of her records sets up particular conventions in the first minute or two that define the parameters of what we'll hear: the dissonant opening to Time, the drums on Soul Journey.

I mean, there are plenty of other pleasures in this music, but their structure as full albums is part of it.

Revelator is conceptually brilliant.

WHAT DO I PLAY TO SEDUCE CORNY FOLK FUCK

For me, it's been downhill since Revival, and her reference to Gram Parsons pretty much takes all the fun out of ODing in a cheap motel room with a groupie.

i think revelator is the only record where she figured out how to do something wholly her own. still shows all her obvious debts and influences, and still indulges in some po-faced po'-folks stuff, but the musical and lyrical reference points are farther flung and more mysterious than on the other albums. i think it's really a great record. the songs stand up individually but also cohere into something greater, mystical, apocalyptic (and/or rapturous, if there's a difference).

on another note, anyone heard tim and mollie o'brien's cover of "wichita"? that's one of my favorite non-revelator gil songs, but she hasn't released a version of it herself as far as i know. the o'briens version is great.

Yeah, I totally agree about Revelator, and Soul Journey was a bit of a letdown in that regard - I mean not that she went backward or anything, but the album didn't add up to much for me.

I also really like the Nowhere Man/Whiskey Girl song for similar reasons (does something her own, loses the po-faced schtick)

All the talk of Red Clay upthread reminded me of this story

I guess taste is taste, but I can't help but think that people who use the "NPR music" zing are more interested in stylistic than qualitative distinctions.

I mean i remember that xhucx kept calling her "schoolmarm folk," and I can hardly accuse him of being deaf to qualitative distinctions, but I don't hear schoolmarm folk in Gillian Welch at all.

well there is something a little antiseptic about her, although in a somewhat complicated way (as marcello's first post does a good job of illuminating: "too impeccable to be real; not enough dirt on her boots, not enough creases in his suit. But then that's the point.")

i understand complaints about her humorlessness, even though i think she's funny sometimes, and as far as neo-authenticity goes she can be a big offender. but that's one reason i think revelator is her best record, because it kind of moved beyond a lot of that. a few songs aside (including "red clay halo," which i like a lot anyway because it's a good tune), it's not particularly mannered or self-consciously rootsy.

"npr music" though is just as dumb as any other dumb tag. bob dylan is npr music too. so is ella fitzgerald. and?

I always thought "Red Clay Halo" was a cover - it sounds like some kind of traditional song that's filtered down over the years into the martyr complex of mainstream country (and a lot of rural, or wannabe rural, white people - them big city elites are making fun of us!).

guess I missed the secret sign that "npr music" was supposed to be trenchant criticism. ok, you've convinced me that she's crap. will stop listening to her and all other npr crap immediately.

Can we agree on a definition - "NPR Rock" ??

ROFFLE:

somewhere between crowded house and wilco.

-- stockholm cindy (winter version) (Jody Beth Rosen), Friday, 20 January 2006 05:12 (1 year ago) Link
...there lies obsession.

-- Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 20 January 2006 05:32 (1 year ago) Link

This thread reminds me of what Tom Smucker (quoted by Xgau) said about Woodstock:
"I left one thing out of my Woodstock article. I left out how boring it was."

No album in four years though and no current tours.

― Hurting 2, Tuesday, October 23, 2007 5:09 AM (11 months ago) Bookmark

What is up with that?

weirder is that there kind of were tours, right? like a bunch of american shows a year ago, maybe. she's got really good new songs, too.

I am watching this right now: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0074qnh/BBC_Four_Sessions_Gillian_Welch/

(which that Youtube is from)

yeah funny that it's been so long since her last record! i interviewed her in 2005, i think, and at the time she hinted that a new record was imminent. guess not! she did say that she liked having her own label because it allowed her to go by her own timeline. have heard one amazing new song "the way it will be" that they play live. though calling it new at this point is silly, i think I heard them do it in 2003 ...

saw her in brooklyn last year and she was grrr8

website lists a bunch of albums that she and david rawlings have "appeared" on, no tour dates

I kind of assumed after Everything Is Free and Wrecking Ball that she'd just never bother recording for public release again.

New album due next year according to metacritic; no release date as yet.

I saw her play summer before last and she was superb. They are a uniquely mesmerising live act. That song "Throw Me A Rope" has been hanging around at least since near the time of Soul Journey. Hope it's on any new album that comes out.

^It should be; it's been a staple of the live set for a while. In an NPR interview at Newport this year she said she & Dave were in the midst of recording a new album. Said it doesn't take them all that long to record them, just to start recording.

And YOW! that initial post! Well done, Marcello. Though I would argue vociferously with many of your transcriptions ("every word seen in the data"?) and quibble with your interpretations, you capture the SPIRIT of the record extremely well. It's an album that calls for interpretation, explication, exegesis. Repeated listening as a whole artifact, complete immersion, fear and trembling. It has some kind of special power that she'll probably never tap again (and the timing of the album was accidentally impeccable; it had a weight that seemed to capture the whole circa-911 American underground zeitgeist perfectly). For a long, long time I've wanted to write a fairly lengthy piece about this album but have felt - have been - unequal to it. Yours will do instead. Kudos.

have just been blown away by this album, having not played it in years. there's not one wasted moment. great writing upthread too.

Six years without a record. Weird.

don't think she's toured in a very long time either

Doesn't she guest on a track on the Dark Was The Night compilation?

Maybe she is gone off the net because of me.

Man, I loved Soul Journey at the time, I might dig it out again this evening.

I think she plays at least a few shows every year -- and there's something called the David Rawlings Machine that seems to be playing out from time to time. Not sure what that is, though. Covers? But yeah, the fact that she's made what -- 4 records in 15 years does not suggest someone too concerned with a standard timetable. But anyone who's made a record as flat out brilliant as Revelator has earned her laziness!

http://atruersound.blogspot.com/2007/07/gillian-welch-david-rawlings-revival.html

what happened to that duets album that was meant to come out last year

well, this is out ... Basically a Gillian Welch/David Rawlings record, I gather, with Rawlings fronting the band ...
http://kylepetersen.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/daveraw_cover_select-353x.jpg
Haven't heard it though!

it's okay

yeah, it's sort of amazing it took them 6 years to release what is essentially a stop-gap album ...!

I wish she'd come back. I have strong nostalgic ties to Hell Among The Yearlings and it's always been my go-to album of hers. It came along at one of those times in life when no matter what it was coming along it's going to mean something to you forever. It was kinda funny to seek out other albums that I recognized as being equally good, more or less, and to realize that the sentimental pull I've attributed to the music for so long had a lot more to do with time and place, with me and my own life, than anything else. Which of course isn't to sell her short...

Too many years of the wrong GW amirite

I like that Rawlings Band album better and better the more I listen to it. But it ain't a patch on the GW-fronted stuff. You just can't fuck with her voice, whereas DR is a much better backup singer than frontman.

that marcello review is unreadable.

And you realise that this astonishing piece of music is beyond even a reverie, not the reverie of the dying Charles Foster Kane trying to make a personal sense of his life, but the imagined, implanted reverie we recognise from Blade Runner. It is the American equivalent of Tricky's "Aftermath." A replicant trying to learn and assimilate an alien cultural vocabulary. Bowie's imagined Sinatra gabble at the end of "Low." An alien trying to find its mother, its womb.

actually part of it is very readable, for roffles.

Yeah, that review is pretty much horseshit.

I've seen GW and DR MANY times - at Merlefest, with the bluegrass faithful who absolutely LOVE them, at Bonnaroo, with the hippies, who also LOVE them, and out in LA at the Largo, a venue that, among other things, serves as their home away from home. She is FAR from humorless, is an excellent musician, and any aping or pantomime that may come across to those looking for more "authentic" country is her adoption of a certain musical vocabulary, and not her attempt to come across as real or the genuine article.

ALL the musicians I've ever seen her play with - Emmy Lou Harris, Tony Rice, Alison Kraus, etc. - they all have a great affection for these two, and obv. enjoy the opportunity to play with them.

That's all I'll ever need to know.

saw Dave Rawling Machine in London last night; was incredible and kicking myself for not checking out the album after i heard some reviews comparing it unfavourably to the GW albums, as all the stuff sounded great. they did a few Gillian songs too, PLUS OH MY FUCKING GOD special guest for nearly the whole set JOHN PAUL JONES on mandolin. They covered Cortez The Killer and Queen Jane Approximately. With JOHN PAUL JONES. possibly gig of the year. Old Crow Medicine Show headlined afterwards and we left after 20 minutes. Pretty good stuff but not comparable to what came before.

yeah, i pity anyone who has to follow those guys, whether it's gillian welch straight up or dave rawlings machine. still need to get that album, though. any news on an actual gillian welch record?

www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/psst-gillian-welchs-new-the
looks like there is finally a new record coming out! better be good, right?

http://cache.dealbreaker.com/uploads/2010/11/drudge-siren2.gif

http://www.twentyfourbit.com/post/5556572784/gillian-welch-to-release-fifth-lp-in-june

It’s been eight years since Gillian Welch’s last solo album came out, but the wait for a follow-up to 2003’s Soul Journey will soon be over: NPR reports that Welch’s fifth LP, The Harrow and the Harvest, will arrive on June 28 via her own label, Acony Records.

Though she hasn’t released much music under her own name in nearly a decade, Welch has been steadily touring and collaborating with a number of artists in the meantime, more recently recording in the studio and performing on Conan with the Decemberists for the first single off their latest album, The King is Dead. Welch and longtime musical partner/producer David Rawlings have also been touring in support of both his debut LP and Conor Oberst’s 2010 Concert for Equality rally.

Details are scarce at the moment, but in the meantime, you can catch her on tour with Buffalo Springfield

Very exciting. Hoping for something akin to "Revelator"..

SWEEEEEEEEET

The affiliation with Oberst is troubling but I'm crossing my fingers....

personally find the affiliation with the decemberists more worrying since they've actually been performing with them (also i prefer oberst (in the "better a punch the balls than a kick in the balls" way)).

as long as neither is on the album it's not a problem. and if they are, who knows, maybe it will be ok.

welch/rawlings affiliate with a lot of people. gotta do something while you're putting off making a record of your own for eight years.

otm

Welch/Rawlings are so tasteful and their instincts so sound that I think they could make the most of a Peaches cameo, let alone someone actually sympathetic like Oberst or the Decemberists. I wouldn't sweat it.

otm!
weirdly, heard "my morphine" on the radio (college station) while driving around yesterday. dj seemed to be doing some kind of "country drug song" set. ("Sam Stone" preceded it). What a crazy, slow, beautiful song.

xp i dunno, pretty much every time they collaborate with someone it's much worse than them on their own. at least part of that is making bad choices about who to collaborate with.

having said that a lot of the collaboration things seemed a little half baked, and this sounds more like a real album.

also there doesn't seem to be any suggestion there are any collaborations on this album!

was "soul journey" any good? that completely passed me by.

yeah it was good. kind of had to a little bit of a letdown after the amazing revelator, but some great stuff. kind of think they'll be living up to revelator for the rest of their careers, but who knows?

the songwriting wasn't as strong as revelator imo, but i did like the full band sound

er
http://www.gillianwelch.com/images/thth500.png

Acony Records is proud to announce that on June 28, 2011 they will release The Harrow & The Harvest, the new album by Gillian Welch, featuring ten new songs recorded at her own Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, Tennessee and produced by David Rawlings.

On May 30, 2011, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings will embark on a North American tour supporting The Harrow & The Harvest that will continue through the summer and into the fall. The acclaimed duet will visit over seventy cities in their most extensive tour in over a decade.

At least they have a sense of humor about what they do.

haha, yeah.

Welch/Rawlings are so tasteful

I agree but isn't this also why some people don't like 'em? I think Chuck Eddy on some other thread might have said how he finds them too mannered or something.

yeah, i mean, i can see that -- they're definitely calculated in some ways, but it works for me.

The calculation can be a put-off - I saw Welch/Rawlings live a year or so ago, and I was a bit bugged by the unwavering setlist, right down to the covers - but, I mean, they did go to the Berklee School of Music. It's formalist, to a degree, but like, I dunno, Nickel Creek, they do seem to have a subtle post-modern approach to what they do that counters charges of outright affectation.

right, yeah, i think i *like* the calculation involved, like a lot of their stuff seems really precisely tailored for effect. while still managing to be emotionally involving.

that record cover is amazing

you can hear a new song 26 minutes into this

really awesome synth sound

rawlings can really spit

no, kidding, sounds like all the other lps but in a good way

the new album has some really beautiful songs - tennessee and the way the whole thing ends in particular.

god this woman is dull dull dull

I find her unmoving as well, which surprised me given the raves and the fact that I like many other similar artists. I can't put my finger on what's missing...

Love the first half of the new one - not so sure about the rest.

I've seen her - or them - live twice, and both times they were really mesmerising. I can understand the impulse that lies behind one finding her dull, but I can't excuse it. ;-) "Time (The Revelator)" and "Soul Journey" are both really good albums.

I used to dismiss her, but it was actually Dave Rawlings' album that brought me around.

I'd say she/they are incomparably wonderful compared to the vast majority of comparable artists in their (supposed) field. which would probably be 'alt country' / 'americana' of course

ive listened to time the revelator so much over these past months. its kindof difficult to talk about it without getting into cliches about haunting reveries or something. im interested in the closing song though, i dream a highway. its part of the tradition of folk epics about the conflation of large themes with small details. i like how it uses that form, the folk song with the endless verses and makes it feel so stretched out and distended. this combined with the road imagery makes me think of like krautrock and kraftwerk but instead of the gleaming autobahns of the future its the dusty roads out of the past. idk how relevant or interesting this is to anybody its just something i noticed and seems kindof pertinent to the ways their formalisms work a kindof postmodern filtering of tradition, i mean you could almost not notice it at all.

i mentioned liking GW a little after i heard her, and the girl i was talking to kinda took a moment and then said, ah, right; adult contemporary.

xp at jamie btw

streaming on npr. sounds very nice. http://www.npr.org/2011/06/26/137346722/first-listen-gillian-welch-the-harrow-and-the-harvest

weird that there are three "the way" songs here .

i'm loving this album.

what I said upthread about the 1st half dominating still holds, except that "Hard Times" might be the best thing on it. Mind you I have an irrational annoyance towards the old-timey lyrical bent to some tunes ("Down Along the Dixie Line," "The Way the Whole Thing Ends").

Worth the wait.

Great show at the Warfield in SF tonight. The new tunes sounded fab & slotted right in with the old. Gillian danced!

Rawlings is the most original guitar player of his generation

Alec Wilkinson on the New Yorker blog

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/07/gillian-welch-the-harrow-and-the-harvest.html#ixzz1RaPygURc

Some weird hyperbole in that piece. "No guitarist at the moment is more immediately recognizable." I mean, I love Rawlings and think he's an incredible guitarist doing neat things in a tradition-based medium. I could listen to an album of just him playing guitar. But at the same time, he's beholden enough to the style of said medium that I don't hear him as nearly as distinctive as the author. He's a virtuoso, like Chris Thile, but because he plays in service of such a specific style - and because he's so tasteful to boot - he does a good job disappearing into the music.

New album is nice, by the way, but almost perverse in that it followed such a long wait, seeing as it's not terribly substantial or substantive (in the general sense; those words read more negative than I'd intend).

"Dark Turn of Mind" is hot/scary

xpost yeah, "most original" is a stretch too. I mean maybe he's the most original bluegrassy/flatpickin-acoustic guitarist of his generation or something, but most original guitarist is kind of silly, especially in a generation that has a lot of really interesting guitarists.

Damn this is a great album.

First reaction to this is that on some songs I find her studied drawl to be grating. I think that's actually when I like her least -- when she's really pushing the not-quite-geographically-placeable 'southern' diction the hardest, which also usually happens to be on the most not-quite-placeably "traditional" sounding songs. I like her best when she breaks away from this, e.g. on The Way it Will Be.

As "smart" folk music, not bad, but when she sang, with sincerity, "that's the way the cornbread crumbles" I got hungry and wandered into the kitchen for a brownie.

I guess I hoped Time the Revelator was going to signal a gradual new direction, although Soul Journey dispelled that idea. Her gothic Americana schtick on songs like Tennessee just seems dreary and tired, like, ok we get it, country life with a dark underbelly, the exact same dark underbelly each time, one that feels more like an approximation of something from literature or film than something lived. Somehow the result is even more two-dimensional than the simple, traditional folk tunes like Six White Horses.

I like the songs that have more California and less country, but there aren't enough of those.

They're gonna be on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross today

So where's the Pitchfork review?

too Americana maybe

She sounds like a countrified Jennifer Herrema on The Way It Goes. Brilliant album, are her other albums similar?

Yeah, her other albums are VERY similar IMO.

Time The Revelator is probably the best.

Very special show in Montreal last night. (Her first-ever visit.)

just saw her play two sets in tucson. this woman is the fucking bomb.

"ok we get it, country life with a dark underbelly, the exact same dark underbelly each time, one that feels more like an approximation of something from literature or film than something lived."

That's because she's an LA gal whose parents were both in entertainment and her work is just as much acting as it is music. I'm not gonna play the authenticity card, because the same thing is true of Tom Waits, but she always sounded like she was trying a bit too hard.

I did enjoy her live though. She has that quietly spellbinding quality.

i don't know, the whole "she's not *really* going down in the coal mines" thing is such a non-starter. it could be applied to pretty much any of the great singer-songwriters of the last 75 years. who says you have to "live" something to write a song about it? i mean, either you buy it or you don't, but let's not pretend that, say, hank williams was any less of an "actor."

kinda reminds me of joni mitchell saying that bob dylan was a 'phony.' he is, but who cares?

yeah he's totally a phony! and he's great!

pretty sure greil marcus hates gillian welch (and lucinda williams) for exactly these reasons, tho.

I'm excited to hear a new Gillian Welch album! Soul Journey wasn't bad but didn't live up to the hope of the previous albums, which I played to death for a while. Seems like Ilx has always been unfairly harsh on most alt country guys and gays. Never understood why.

ilx loves the alt country gays.
no, i really like the latest one. they are masters at the acoustic duo thing.

Oh um I meant gals.

ha yeah, i figured. i'd imagine the general disinterest is due at least in part to the rockist wars of 2004-ish. in a lot of ways, alt-country was presented as this "real, authentic" thing, which rubs everyone the wrong way (with good reason). doesn't mean that there weren't/aren't good songwriters/bands in there though. funny that gillian welch gets in trouble for not being authentic enough though.

lyrically she hasn't reached the highs of TtR again, but damn, those are such good lyrics it would be about impossible.

If you don't like Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, I don't really have much to say to you.

I listened to a Dave Rawlings Machine album and was underwhelmed by his vocals. He's listenable but just in a guy at am open-mike at a bar singing folk and country kinda way.

Do you mean the new one? I dunno - I like it OK. I especially like that long one, "The Trip," which makes me think he's been listening to T-Bone Burnett's "The Murder Weapon" (and actually a lot of songs from that Proof Through the Night album, come to think of it). I always check out what he's up to, and while I'm never knocked out, I'm never turned off, either.

Now, can someone explain why the hell none of the Gillian Welch albums have been released on vinyl? Surely a 180 gram reissue of Time (The Revelator) has "RSD release" written all over it.

"Ok" is the key. He is just ok.

I do like some of the live David Rawlings clips:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er-3YLVIONc

I really love "Bells of Harlem". Didn't know there was a new one.

i always thought that was a song written by ryan adams. apparently they wrote it together. anyways it is one of the highlights of heartbreaker, ryan adams amazing debut.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_c1YM53Wwo

this is exciting.

If there are future volumes for each album in her discography, I will probably buy them all. Hoping too this means a vinyl issue of Time The Revelator is being planned. One of the few albums for which I would unhesitatingly plunk down for a super deluxe vinyl box set

Oooh, my wife will like that and want to hear the unreleased songs. Me, I'm just kinda curious

If this thing is being released only on cd, why does that give us hope that TTR will get a vinyl look-in?

I guess my thinking was that if she's at the stage in her career in which the catalogue is being reassessed, eventually a full vinyl reissue campaign would have to follow. I bet they'll wait for RSD or something, but it's pretty strange that TTR has never had a vinyl release. In short, it's just wishful thinking on my part, I guess!

Surprise new album!!

https://gillianwelch.bandcamp.com/album/all-the-good-times

Yay! A summer with a new Gillian Welch *and* a new Kathleen Edwards!

oh my god welch/rawlings doing "hello in there"....I am dead with happiness

<3

nice

I can't imagine this will be anyone's favorite welch/rawlings release but it's such a nice surprise that it seems churlish to complain

^this

Yay! A summer with a new Gillian Welch *and* a new Kathleen Edwards!

Thanks for the news, hadn't thought to check. Also, the prev. linked 21-track Boots No. 1 https://www.uncut.co.uk/news/listen-exclusive-stream-gillian-welchs-boots-no-1-official-revival-bootleg-98175/ has a lot of my fave W&R studio work---they've always seemed pretty dependable live, at least on Public Radio concert series but some of the studio albums put me right to sleep. Also, the most recent Sound Machine studio album was pretty uneven, but it's mostly him---there was a time when she was touring as a part of the Machine, albeit a part producing a large amount of Sound, and that was good on Public Radio too (she said later that she was disgusted by her songwriting for several years, so shifted to thinking of herself as Dave's touring singer/rhythm guitarist).

yeah obviously this isn't a "proper" new GW record of originals, but damn it sounds good. would love it if they loosened up a little and did more things like this.

Yeah, and they do "Abandoned Love"! Didn't know about that song 'til you linked Dylan's version, Tyler, thanks. Getting generous with their Bandcamp---for isnt, all of this:
https://gillianwelch.bandcamp.com/album/boots-no-1-the-official-revival-bootleg

A covers series, yes!

the most recent Sound Machine studio album was pretty uneven

Are you talking about Nashville Obsolete or Poor David's Almanack? The latter was released under his own name and I think it's excellent, although it didn't seem to get much attention at the time.

At some point live they turned into the living embodiment of the Prairie Home Companion, but I love that I can listen to the records whenever I want separate from the gimmick. They are admittedly fun live, though, particularly because of Rawlings, who is a great player and pretty funny.

Good summary, Josh. xpost I meant Almanack, but although I remember it as sometimes not handling the predictable folkie elements very well, my Nashville Scene ballot for 2017 releases does have it in the Related Top Ten (imaginary category I always add); the only comment there is an aside in notes on Boots No. 1: "Some of these are full band, rockin' in a Model-A way. (Electrified music is one of the traditions saluted and utilized on Welch-partner David Rawling’s Poor David’s Almanack)." So yeah, I guess I liked it pretty well overall.

Time (the revelator) is such a matchless collection of songs that it does put the rest of their oeuvre in the shade somewhat but I will honestly lap up any old thing they put out because their singing and playing is such a tonic. I could listen to them harmonise forever

such a good album is that.

I admittedly don’t keep up with interviews etc but is there any explanation behind her lack of output over the last decade? Seems like she’s been active but there is just no rush to release an album’s worth of new music.

iirc just good old-fashioned writer's block

Revelator is all-time, but Harrow sure gives it a run for the money.

She's been writing plenty but it's been on Rawlings' albums.

Personally I'd say Harrow was the least essential of the albums released under her own name. Revelator >>> Revival >>> Yearlings >>> Soul Journey >>> Harrow

fite me

Agreed re: Harrow. The “Way it Could Be” boot was the follow-up album I needed & didn’t get.

Pretty stoked for this covers record tho.

BOOTS NO. 2: THE LOST SONGS is the second release of archival music from the vault of
@gillianwelch
and
@thedaverawlings
. This remarkable 48 song collection will be spread over three volumes. Volume One will be released digitally on 7/31. Listen to two new songs now and preorder.
https://store.aconyrecords.com/products/boots-no-2-the-lost-songs-vol-1

https://is4-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Music113/v4/3c/9a/40/3c9a4011-0e12-8ab9-8cbc-adea3f56f1c9/source/450x450bb.jpg

Strange Isabella, one of the pre-release tunes, is particularly nice.

All The Good Times contains two Dylan covers but not Diamond Joe - did they ever cut this one in the studio?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GQSN9V5frc

(oh right, Good As I Been To You is the Dylan album with the incomplete credits - it's a traditional. I stand corrected)

xxpost All 16 tracks of Volume One streaming here:
https://gillianwelch.bandcamp.com/

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/gillian-welch-david-rawlings-boots-album-1035488/

waited until Bandcamp Friday to get this, am loving the shit out of it so far

16 tracks, but they slip right through the headphones, beautifully sung and played, former mostly her, latter her and Dace, presumably, anyway can be two or maybe more guitars meshing---in s string of all those scenes, situations, from all those lives, or maybe it's one life, which makes the listening-thinking even eerie-er--find myself going back to listen to subsets before I can get away. Some are glimpses---Pitchfork review backstory has it that she and he went through many notebooks, pulling out sketches, fragments etc., trying to beat a publishing contract deadline, and be done with that contract--so some of them end abruptly, but folk songs can do that too, and overall I think it works pretty well. And this is only Part 1 of 3.

speaking of the Pitchfork review, I think it's otm:https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gillian-welch-boots-no-2-the-lost-songs-vol-1/

And unlike my comments, no typos (sorry).

Despite having mostly listened to progressive hip-hop, r&b, and electronic pop in recent years, I find myself listening to 'The Lost Songs Vol. 1' every couple days since it came out. There's a sort of perfection, a "just so"-ness about Welch's tunes that I think at some points I've tired of, but right now, it's just so appealing. Perhaps the relative "smallness" of these tunes and this collection is particularly appealing. It's just inimitably tight songcraft--nothing surprising, nothing "innovative," but that just doesn't matter when the songs are this pure.

Really excited for the further two volumes, if they're even close to as good as this one. It slightly beggars belief that these were all essentially unused scraps, completed and recorded over a weekend--but if so, even more astonishing. Who has recordings like this, and waits around for 18 years and an inland hurricane to decide to share them?

Everything Is Free has been covered by lots of artists. This one from Sylvan Esso with Jenn Wasner is hypnotic

Lost Songs Vol 2 is out, and it's even better than Vol 1.
https://gillianwelch.bandcamp.com/album/boots-no-2-the-lost-songs-vol-2

An over abundance of riches then. I’m still enjoying Vol. 1 :)

Didn't hit me quite as instantaneously as 'Vol 1.,' but I think I was distracted by the new Sault. Revisiting today.

All afire on a Gillian kick, first in 10+ years. Spent the day making up the fantasy album that might have come out between “Soul Journey” and “Harrow”.

Bottom of the Sea
Knuckleball Catcher
Gamblin’ Man
Someone Like You
Cops Won’t Leave Me Alone
Lawman
We’re the Outlaws Now
Tell Me What You Think About
I Love You More Than Ever
Fair and Tender Rose
Too Many Nights on Your Own
Spiritual Way

If they had ever made this record, for sure they would have dropped a couple — if only for length — but they left an embarrassment of riches on the cutting room floor... I hope Boots vol 3 rectifies this.

Second reel, songs slipping by, scenes from life, maybe all the same life, getting around---as in Part 1, but now seems like I'm spending more time in each song, though they aren't longer now, don't think, and while there are words, whole verses sometimes that I'll have to come back to, the music always pulls me in and along---maybe it's a bit more intense overall, than Part 1.
Hadn't noticed before any use of recognizable whole melodies---of course the phrasing, of writing and performance, has always fit the classic folk-country-blues nexus, somebody growing up with that on the radio, not the Smithsonian box sets, is the suggestion,using that vibe and tradition for their own personal folk process, even when it's something they can't say out loud---but here "Didn't I" makes personal use of "This Train," and "Fair September" reminds me of "Seven Bridges Road," though it's cooler, even speculative, while roaming in a month of transition, an emotional weather report, as Tom Waits would say: trailing the heat wave, after "You gave me a thirst, no water could quell." Not too fancy, but can imagine a jazz take.
"I Only Cry When You Go" strikes me right off like a classic Willie Nelson ballad, somebody better cover this. She's tough, he thinks she don't need him, which goes with the fear inside "Good Baby" and "Beautiful Boy," where she's scared of lots of things, "most of all the telephone," but also the "moments of romance, giving what can't be repaid"--think that's what she says! Like, giving what isn't really hers to give, this classic love stuff she's learned about, heard about, like everybody does? Think that's right. "Picasso" comes to her door, paints a picture of her she don't like, shows things in her, but she's gonna go "get a hotel" and this longing out of her system, so art can help, maybe.
"Pappa Writes To Johnny": Road song, no whinin' just sayin' (and after all, "Why would you laugh, if you felt like cryin', why would you say it, if sayin' it was lyin'"): okay then, "Dark was the night, cold was the ground, so I got up, and I walked around," but there's a turn-around/possible "meet-up" of a kind at the end that I won't spoil.
"Wella Hella" is the only plugged-in one, I think, but that's okay, pretty much all of these have the juice it seems.
Part 3 will be here by the end of the year, right?
https://gillianwelch.bandcamp.com/album/boots-no-2-the-lost-songs-vol-2

"Giving what can't be repaid" might also/instead (sounds like also, in context) what she gets from him that can't be repaid, or so she fears.

More and more, these seem like the songs of someone who doesn't trust herself to do justice to her feelings, their object and inspiration, private life, public expression--so maybe that's why she left them in the can, unfinished for so long---she did say in an interview or publicity materials that she got disgusted with her writing, just toured as a member of Dave's band for a while---although on the radio tapes I have, her voice in effect sings lead, she can't help it being that distinctive, gotta give it up to her talent after all, and so she has by finishing these things.

At least we're not getting them on a Neil Young/Arthur Russell/Patrick Cowley timescale.

Also, maybe singing them in the persona/POV of the self-mistrustful woman with good secrets, clues, cards, is how she got them finished, even if particulars orig. came from old postcards, snapshots in thrift store books, Netflix, whatever.

They wrote & finished them back in — what? 02? — but are just releasing them now. Decent interview in Rolling Stone that details the history.

Third volume is due in I believe November.

They trotted out a handful of these “lost songs” in concert at the time, gave em a little spin in the light, but none stuck around even as far as Soul Journey.

There was another clutch of songs between Soul Journey and Harrow that Gil & Dave weren’t happy with — that bunch referred to in many interviews where “our writing slipped, I got writers block.” The only one from those that made the cut for Harrow was “The Way It Will Be” ... plus I guess “Someone Like You” which became “Dark Turn of Mind” with completely rewritten lyrics. But I think that batch of songs is at least as strong as what made it onto Harrow — I cant see why they rejected “Spiritual Way” or “Knuckleball Catcher” but let “Down Along the Dixie Line” slip past the goalie.

“Oh, two mennonites on the road.”

Yes, and several if not most of these Vol 2 songs are about frustrations and resources of well-tended, too-well guarded thoughts and feelings, incl. might mess up the other person if you did disclose/share, also yourself if you failed, but also the price of seeming like you don't need him---anyway, it works, backstory in Stone and elsewhere, yeah---- the also fine Boots No. 1, from sessions that first yielded Revival, is also on bandcamp, along with all original releases and that recent quarantine bedsit set of covers:
https://gillianwelch.bandcamp.com/music

Sorry, I meant to post that on What Are You Listening To?, thought you and I were on there! I had just posted about this set there. Anyway, yeah, all of her stuff is on bandcamp, or just about.

I’d love to see a comp of stray tracks, soundtrack stufff, etc. Their version of “Dreadful Wind & Rain” is killer, and largely unavailable. Other things like “Ride, Ride” would fit nicely alongside.

These lost songs collections are astounding. Imagine having a song as good as Picasso lying about the place?

yeah, crazy that both of them pretty much feel like classic albums — and crazier still that there's still one more on the way!

Yeah, and it's not like with Dylan, where so much good-to-great stuff was fairly well-known and available for so long before The Bootleg Series, also, in terms of out-of-the-blue news, as I said, we're not getting them on a Neil Young/Arthur Russell/Patrick Cowley timescale, so this is ideal.

aargh volume 3 is up next, the preview track "Peace in the Valley" is an original rather than the standard, one of her songs of clear-eyed doom which nobody else can touch. Unbelievable it just sat on a tape for two decades.

still holding out for a welch recording of "you just don't love me"... only one i know is heather waters and apparently that's only available on deezer (!!!)

Finally getting to Volume 2. Damn it’s so good. She was mining an endless seam of beautiful tunes.

Biggish NYT profile piece here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/magazine/gillian-welch-david-rawlings.html

Vol. 3 is up today: https://gillianwelch.bandcamp.com/
First listen: first track rides me out of the gate, second straight ahead, number three is stone cold showstopper, throws me into the Kurt Weillian arms of four, five curls me into a delta pallet, but then--well there are several that seem most like vehicles, mainly handy for just the right simple-subtle goosebump performance, yknow that's all it would take, predictable in their way, but handy for sure, and could also imagine buckskin Neil Young bringing out more of the strummy drama of "If I Ain't Goin' To Heaven" and "Peace In The Valley"--but there are also more stone colds crying out to be covered---not strictly necessary, but nice to oblige them by imagining, say, xpost Willie again on "Strangers Again," him and/or Toby Keith, Eric Church on "The Cowboy Rides Away," and the Everly Brothers must come back for "There's a First Time For Everything" and omg "The Streets of St. Paul."
Bold souls will find a way to the disconcerting, possibly post-gospel "Put Your Foot Upon The Path: "You may live another day, you may never laugh again."
"One Little Song" seems like the perfect nightcap lullaby send-off for the whole thing, which will (via her site only) be a box set, vinyl + your choice of MP3, WAV, or FLAC---real purty but the CD version is $30.00 cheaper and I don't have a record player. Though of course bandcamp has all the digital options for each vol., no CDs sold sep., however.

Plenty of momentum in this set, not that there wasn't in the first two, but maybe a sense of being in the homestretch, that they've gotten used to doing all this, know it's all gonna be alright.

This isn't bad at all, but I don't really get as much of a thrill from it. A few of those songs where I feel she's too-obviously putting on a character, asking god for redemption or whatever, which doesn't come across as sincerely as others do.
Also - two previously released songs ("Make Me Down a Pallet on Your Floor", which is traditional anyway, and "One Little Song") and "Streets of St Paul" is obviously an early version of "Wrecking Ball".

We are so happy to announce our upcoming reissue of Gillian Welch & David Rawlings' All The Good Times on CD.

Previously released in limited handmade editions available only from our webstore, the new version of the CD will be available everywhere on March 5th, 2021.

The first Gillian Welch / David Rawlings collaboration to feature both of their names, All The Good Times is a collection of 10 acoustic covers and has received a 2021 GRAMMY nomination for Best Folk Album.

After a devastating tornado ravaged Nashville in the Spring of 2020 making their studio unusable, immediately followed by a global pandemic shutting down their community and touring livelihood, Welch and Rawlings were able to find the inspiration to set up recording equipment in their home living room and record 10 performances on their reel-to-reel of some of their favorite songs from the likes of John Prine (“Hello In There”), Bob Dylan (“Abandoned Love”), Norman Blake (“Ginseng Sullivan”), and more.
A vinyl reissue is coming later this year - more details to come!

didn't know anybody still uses reel-to-reel---advantages?

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TQonl6exhNU/maxresdefault.jpg

Advantage - those amazing 70s memories taping music off the radio. Otherwise shrug

Tape loops

Congratulations to Gillian Welch & David Rawlings for winning Best Folk Album at the 63rd annual GRAMMY awards last night for All The Good Times!

All The Good Times is now available on compact disc worldwide, as well as on streaming and digital download services.

A vinyl reissue is coming later this year - more details to come!
Why this and not Boots 02? Maybe the latter was rec. too long ago or some other Grammys rules/logic

It's been a while since anyone said it so: the Boots series is just extraordinary.

This is probably challopsy but I've had a few so: the thing that eventually makes me turn Welch off is Rawlings: his tone is rich and beautiful but his runs can get a bit samey and busy. I'll get my coat.

Co-sign the love for the Boots series. It’s an interesting compare / contrast with Miranda Lambert’s Marfa Tapes. But also love Rawlings guitar work…

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/gillian-welch-time-the-revelator-1203615/

It's highs are not as high as Time (The Revelator), but Harrow and the Harvest has been like a slow burn for the past 12 years or whatever since it came out, just slowly but perpetually rising in my esteem and my heart. I go back and forth on whether I can say it's my favorite.

Anyway, I was just listening to "Hard Times" and searching to see if "we're supping on tears, we're supping on wine" was their own construction. It is, I think, but I was pleased to see that it is an allusion to the original "Hard Times" (Come Again No More), which features the line

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor

Nice little Easter egg, made me smile.

Also, as incredible as the Boots comps are and as gorgeous as their covers can be, I would really love to hear some new original music from these folks!

Harrow & Harvest was just rereleased on vinyl after selling for $$ on discogs for a while.

Listened to Soul Journey for the first time last night and I liked it more than expected. The cover and title aren’t very compelling, but it’s pretty good.

Also, as incredible as the Boots comps are and as gorgeous as their covers can be, I would really love to hear some new original music from these folks!

Don't sleep on Poor David's Almanack from a few years back. It's credited to Rawlings, but there are several co-writes with Welch and she sings and plays on it as well.

Thanks for the endorsement. There are a few songs I love dearly from his first couple but as full albums they are a clear cut below the ones in her name. Can't remember if I ever gave that new(er) one a listen though.

Xpost Hard Times. There’s a great fan-made video set against clips of Paper Moon.

And it’s worth hearing Chris Thile’s super fast version on mandolin. I prefer Gillian’s version but ymmv

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qiija5dBBIw

Last night's spangles and yesterday's pearls
Are the bright morning stars of the barroom girls

OTM

(maaaan)Anybody jonesing for Gillian and Dave should check out Kieran Kane & Rayna Gellert:
https://kanegellert.bandcamp.com/album/the-flowers-that-bloom-in-spring

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3960809645_16.jpg

This is superb, thank you dow. Love the art, too.

You're welcome! I like the art on the Bandcamp page too. This is something I just came across on there, still need to check the two previous duet albs they've posted. Every time I listen, it hits me a little harder, in that-low key way.

What the folk https://store.aconyrecords.com/products/the-harrow-the-harvest-reel-to-reel/

“Oh cool, I’ll pay $75 for thaWHAAAAAAAAAAA

You underrate the value of the deluxe slipcase and custom tape boxes.

All I wanted was Revelator on vinyl.

Red Clay Halo is just the best

They're still alive! Newport Folk Festival, July 27th (sold out already)

http://gillianwelch.com/tour/

! Moar dates please

new album 8/23!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcOFbwRGii0

o m f g

n i c e

i n d e e d

! ! ! ! !

Sounds good!

Hell yeah. I just watched some of Down From the Mountain a few nights ago. Gillian and Dave looking so young. 25 years later …. the new tune sounds great, more open with a backing band

sounds great, I need to see them on this tour

what an odd career, god bless em!

I like the band sound; I was hoping they’d go more in this direction after Soul Journey. But y’know, 20 years later isn’t too late.

Sounds nice. What have they even been doing all this time.

Oh baby!

They released Poor David's Almanack in 2017 under Rawlings' name but half of which was joint Rawlings/Welch co-writes. It's a great album, don't sleep on it. xp

Gillian and David are adding new shows to their extensive 2024 US Tour including Concord NH, Baltimore, Tysons VA, Philadelphia and a third evening in Saxapahaw, NC. These new shows will go on sale this Friday, August 16 at 10am local time.

FAN CLUB PRESALE INFO

We are offering a special fan club presale for these shows! Use the code HASHTAG to purchase tickets on Tuesday, August 13 at 10am local time.

All previously announced tour dates are on sale now with the exception of Boone, NC, which will be coming soon. Find all ticket links and updated info on the Gillian Welch & David Rawlings Tour Page.

At first they were just listing a Thursday "venue" pre-sale , but then the above one popped up.

My wife got tickets in the afternoon when I noticed that (at which point the center section tickets were gone)

More already sold out than I'd noticed: Evanston, St. Louis, Birmingham, Boston, Portland ME---those last two in New England December---that's loyalty!

David sings on the new song? He sounds good enough but I hope he doesn’t sing lead much more than that.

hmmm no west coast dates yet, sulk

just gorgeous

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVoO0RwoKho

fantastic — so lush! kind of like a comes a time-era Neil song.

First impression: It definitely has a different vibe from past albums. Still fully her, but just a little less traditional.

That track is great, thanks!

Ann Powers at NPR has an August 24 NPR Music email titled "Why I was wrong about Gillian Welch and David Rawlings"

Hello fellow students of the exquisite gesture,

This week offers me a chance to return to an apology I’ve been making off and on for decades. I’m offering it again, this time in full, to my neighbors Gillan Welch and David Rawlings – beloved central figures in the Nashville music scene. The singer-songwriters have a new album out, named Woodland after the studio they co-own down the road from me in the neighborhood we call “East.” Just the second album the longtime partners have released as an official duo (the first, all covers, won a Grammy in 2021), Woodland is a culmination of their work together, which has varied from Welch’s spare early albums, including the 2001 classic Time (the Revelator), to Rawlings’s more band-oriented efforts. Woodland gently draws connections between Welch’s inherent melancholy and Rawlings’ wry humor, as the pair trades lead vocals and lyrical insights like a longtime couple pulling each others’ faded t-shirts out of a shared drawer.

I am absorbed and transported by Woodland, but I'm not here to tell you why this particular Welch-Rawlings release is a winner. (We’ll be running a review soon from one of my favorite music scribes, Jenn Pelly.) I’m here to admit that all those years ago when Welch released her debut album, Revival, I wrote a lukewarm-at-best review that showed my complete misapprehension about what they were up to then and continue to pursue now. My review ran in Rolling Stone, so it had a lot of reach, and to this day other writers cite it as a black mark on my own record as a critic and an undue burden on the duo as they were just embarking on what would be a remarkably storied career. I don’t know about the latter – few agreed with me, then or since. But I’ve thought a lot about why I called Revival a “handcrafted simulacrum” of roots music instead of recognizing it as the real thing it was.

I’ve realized that my problem was a contrarian attitude about authenticity. I am highly suspicious of that term, by the way, even though I will never stop pondering its complexities. Music is often praised as authentic when it plays by certain rules, replicating past sounds and styles, or when it feels direct, unfussy, more serious than phantasmagorical. In their vintage clothes, deploying harmonies they’d learned listening to old Carter Family albums, Welch and Rawlings epitomized that definition whether they wanted to do so or not. That’s why I struggled with the early music – I resented anyone who imposed narrowly defined hierarchies on music, including the fans quickly gathering at Welch and Rawlings’s feet.

When I first encountered the pair, at a South by Southwest showcase the same year Revival came out, the fog of authenticity enshrouded them. Performing at the Driskill Hotel, Welch and Rawlings leaned in close to produce their remarkable vocal blend and acoustic guitar interplay. I had a good seat. I could hear them fine, and was perfectly aware that theirs was a rare art full of grace and mystery. Yet, I couldn’t take that in because I was so put off by what surrounded the duo that day: a stern reverence hemming in the audience, who sat in silence as if that hotel conference room were a church, and not the holy roller kind.

In 1996 I was a holy roller, or maybe a profane one. I wanted music to raucously transport me, to be excessive and fun. Or I wanted it to be weird and smudgy, the way I saw my own life in the then-not-gentrified slippery slope of South Brooklyn. At that same South by Southwest, I’d danced ecstatically to the plastic pop sounds of Imperial Teen, the Bay Area band who had songs with titles like “Copafeelia,” sparkle bombs of sonic playfulness and queer desire. Through no real fault of their own, Welch and Rawlings came to represent the opposite. It was all too dignified – too damned authentic – for me.

It was only later that I realized that authenticity could be defined differently. I learned this partly through experience and partly from two novelists named Richard – Ford and Russo. I’ve written about this before, when reviewing another revivalist who isn’t really that, Tyler Childers; at that time I quoted Ford’s observation that the authentic gesture is the one that isn’t “a learned response.” This thought inverted the usual music-snob hierarchies, privileging spontaneity over convention. Later, I discovered a review by Russo that discussed authenticity in fiction as stemming from an author’s ability to let go of her characters and let them “arrive where they land.” Though external cues may be useful in establishing the ground upon which authenticity can be comprehended – a shared language of rules and customs – it actually emerges from within, an aspect of an individual’s personality and experience or of people’s unscripted interactions with each other. Both Ford and Russo define the authentic gesture as defined by what informs it, but in an unexpected, personal way.

In fiction, that means letting a character’s arc develop gently instead of bending it to fit a plot or a setting. How does this apply to songwriting? I think it requires absorbing influences without worrying too much about mastering them – recognizing, in fact, that what makes them interesting is the mistakes and odd turns that one’s hallowed predecessors made, the obsessions they couldn’t help but pursue, the ingrained strangeness of every individual.

I also see now that in popular music, authenticity is a tool or a vehicle, not a product. This was evident this week at the Democratic National Convention, when Jason Isbell – also an Americana music standard-bearer who’s largely uninterested in such accolades – sang a song for his working-class father, “Something More Than Free,” one night before the Atlanta rapper Lil Jon turned his raunchy classic “Get Low” into a wholesome anthem during the states and territories’ roll call. Both performances were strategic, sending a message about what the idea of “the people” means. Each radiated authenticity because it was thought out, connected to the larger mood of the convention, and carefully executed.

Authenticity, in other words, is something determined by different contexts and inhabited differently by whomever generates it. What I didn’t see about Welch and Rawlings in 1996 was that they were already figuring this out. They were learning back then, not long out of music school, only recently rooted in the city where much of their favorite music had been made. It wouldn’t take long for them to develop intrinsic authenticity, because they already had all the ingredients: Welch’s voice, which seems to emanate from birdsong and women’s whispers and other unannotated musical sources; Rawlings’ sense of time, somehow both attentive and utterly relaxed; as writers, the ability to renew the tired language of the folk revival with the slightest adjustment of perspective. Immersed in history and custom, they were finding a way to inhabit it as people moving toward a new century. They’re still finding that way. “When do we become ourselves?” they sing on “Hashtag,” a song dedicated to their late mentor, the subtle individualist Guy Clark. Years ago, I didn’t realize this question would be a lifelong one for them; now I do.

called Revival a “handcrafted simulacrum” of roots music instead of recognizing it as the real thing it was.

When I first encountered the pair, at a South by Southwest showcase the same year Revival came out, the fog of authenticity enshrouded them

cringe

Jason Isbell – also an Americana music standard-bearer who’s largely uninterested in such accolades

lol what

i don't know why any critic ever gets into assessing true authenticity. it's a pointless exercise, imo.

if you make hillbilly music, i really don't care that much if you're an actual hillbilly or if you just do a good job of sounding like an actual hillbilly ... both are fine with me. i want to know what you think about the music a lot more than what you think about the person making the music.

do i love carpetbaggers? not particularly. but i can give credit to a carpetbagger who's a good performer and has great songs. if you're inauthentic enough, i can sniff you out without someone else telling me to sniff you out.

There’s also the question of who gets to decide what’s “authentic.” That’s a slippery slope. Anyway, the new album is very beautiful.

Anytime I see discussion of “authenticity” as regards music my blood pressure gets up and I want to die.

Loving the new record so far. Very interesting reworking of “Lawman,” which has been around for close to 20 years in a different version. “What We Had” is killing me.

How many songs does Rawlings sing on the new one?

I was just listening to All The Good Times and his takes on Dylan were fine but it pains me to hear him singing when it could be Gillian.

He sings harmony throughout. On a few songs, he takes lead for certain verses, but not extensively. It’s still mostly Gillian singing lead.

But that's not too bad a term its own self: Welch reminds me of Eudora Welty at her peak, having absorbed folk tales, fairy tales even, as well as older forms of pop and art, crafting an aperture and mirror for observers, who don't have to try to wish their way into the past, although that's one option for some, just isn't necessary for others to find something relatable, to care about,something and someone still living in these glimpses, these situations (which is prob along the lines of what Powers went on to say, but I haven't read all of it).
― dow, Sunday, August 25, 2024 6:36 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

But you can say the same thing about Bascom Lamar Lumsford (himself a folklorist and a lawyer by profession) who was memorialized on the Anthology of American Folk Music. In fact, many of the performers we think of as original "roots" music were themselves collectors and gatherers of folk songs, they were just the ones who happened to be around when those first scratchy records were made. And other performers had their acts shaped by record companies, producers, and even folklorists who encouraged them to emphasize certain parts of their persona or music to portray authenticity. I recently read that Doc Watson actually loved playing electric guitar, but was encouraged to play only acoustic to maintain his rootsy image. It's easy to forget sometimes that he was born more than two decades into the twentieth century and came of age when recorded music was already fairly widespread.

Willie Dixon who Led Zeppelin stole from was himself a notorious song thief

I don't think the concept of "authenticity" is COMPLETELY useless, because clearly people mean something by it and other people recognize something by it. But maybe we're really talking about how convincingly someone sells us something or how convincingly they are "in character" in relation to the music. Like I think there are things most of us find cringey (e.g. obviously pampered suburban kid rapping unconvincingly about their gangsta life, dentist looking too comfortable singing the blues, etc.) so maybe "authenticity" is just the opposite of that. It doesn't necessarily have to mean you literally have to grow up in a tin shack on a dirt road to sing old Appalachian music, or even that a dentist can't sing good blues. But OTOH some audiences definitely buy into these authenticity tropes more if they believe that the artist grew up in a tin shack on a dirt road.

I guess to me, Gillian Welch never sounded like she was trying to convince me she grew up in a tin shack, she just did her own spin on music that may have some of its roots in that. If you think about the whole O Brother phenomenon - the film itself, T Bone Burnett's production, etc., all of it is fairly self-aware and not trying to convince you it's authentic old-timey stuff.

In fact, Welch herself commented smartly (maybe in response to powers and other critics) on the whole idea of authenticity in The Revelator.

"the queen of fakes and imitators"

About a year ago, my father-in-law mentioned doing chores for "The Traipsin Woman" in his town, who he recalled had something to do with a music festival. Leading us down the rabbit hole of

https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2019/08/jean-thomas-kentuckys-traipsin-woman.html

Sounds like she was the salt of the earth, but she also went to Hunter College. Lunceford's "Mole in the Ground" was recorded in Ashland, maybe because of her connections?

20th century concern about authenticity in music is so weird now. Powers' certainly captures what a muddled concept it is -- I can't quite extract exactly how her feelings have changed, but it reads as a similar history of emotions I've felt. It's like "authenticity" is orthogonal to "pornography", like you know it when you see it, but upon the slightest reflection you don't.

I love that the Welch album gets "ditch that class in college" out of the way within two verses.

The problem with authenticity is solely with the listener. It often dupes people into liking really boring shit

i prefer fakely boring shit

It’s just good ol’ gatekeeping as usual

Gil & Dave’s turn to modernity in the songwriting is hardly new, tho. They’ve been at it for at least 25 years — by Revelator, they weren’t writing about stills in the holler much, more about going to see a junked-out punk band or lamenting Napster. I thought “Harrow” was a step backwards in that regard, tho admittedly I haven’t spent much time with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPBR8sB1W30

I didn't spend much time with Harrow until relatively recently. Really like Scarlet Town and Hard Times.

Forget about Doreen, thanks!
If somebody in a Welch song seems like she might being trying to wrap her brane around her life in, say, 1924, I often relate to that in whut is this 2024 (wow). And speaking of roots, life goes on and we tend to take of it with us, so why not somebodies---her and Dave, making those harmonies----sounding like the mountains never left them behind---it happens; think of Los Angelena Iris DeMent, hell think of mostly Cali-raised Haggard and Kristofferson----thinking tonight, like on the old camp ground, of how Elvis shook it like a stripper, baby
Bill Monroe put his fusion music (bluegrass) together, put the later touches on it, while following his brothers to jobs in places like East Chicago and Flint.
Maybe 20 years later, Bobby Zimmerman, as he's mentioned to interviewers, heard Monroe's "Drifting To Far From The Shore" while stuck up there in Hibbing, implying that it was an influence on what he looked for in music, as listener, performer, and (as he said in Chronicles, about standing too close to Mike Seeger's overwhelming virtuosity in a loft performance: o shit better go be a) writer--of clever timely lyrics and handy P.Domain tunes, like Woody G and others had done, were doing. -

(Wonder if Powers is also still struggling with considerations of, what is it, that there "rockism")

Born in NYC, raised in LA, adoptive parents "wrote music for The Carol Burnett Show, appeared on the Tonight Show"---]she in "psychedelic surf band" and goth band before what she's best known for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_Welch
So I think of her as metabilly, as partial basis for self-expressin, as with Cali's Blasters, CCR etc (also twangy ol' son of Bay Area working class Les Claypool, with his souped-up hot rod prog and all)

Love Gill and Dave, but I am not getting a lot from the new record. Lots of pleasant and pretty songs but nothing I've connected with really.

I really like hashtag?!

Love Gill and Dave, but I am not getting a lot from the new record. Lots of pleasant and pretty songs but nothing I've connected with really.

I like several of the songs individually, but collectively I think it's a bit of a bore — pretty much how I usually respond to them, with Time (the Revelator) as the major exception. It's all very sturdy, but Welch's determined lack of anything but the driest possible humor keeps me at a bit of a distance.

loving the new one — sounds totally great to my ears

fwiw I adored Harrow and Time with plenty of love for the rest of the catalogue as well. This one just lacks mystery I think.

This is making me realize my first impressions of their records has been “this is pleasant enough but maybe lacking” and then their weird tapped-in-to-the-history-of-song starts to unfold. I’m about halfway with this one. Trainload, North Country,and Hashtag have moved into the this-has-always-existed feel for me. Mississippi hit deep for the first time on my last listen.

this is 100% great imho - ok it's intimate and held back and adult but it's so... perfect. Each note is where it should be and their voices sound even better together now hers dropped a bit with age.

something like "north country" is like every song that "americana" artists have been trying to write for like 25 years — and yet in Welch & Rawlings' hands it feels totally fresh. perfect is the right word.

Runnin around
with her
rag
top
down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsC3wsVSJYk

That sounds like Pistol Annies to me, maybe the song they were listening to the night they said, "Fuck it, let's be a band."

Bout time for a tribute album, don't yall think?

This'll do for now:
Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile---Elvis Presley Blues

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NEFBFMAjRk

i think my main disappointment with woodland is the lack of a rythym section. got excited when empty trainload of sky dropped that drums and bass guitar were back.

Gorgeous live version of "Hashtag"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMuwzkPpa7o

there's about 5 songs from that show on youtube (the others are audience recordings) btw

e.g. I Hear Them All (David Rawlings Machine) / This Land Is Your Land:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX9_GReUhFE

they're going to reissue Time The Revelator and after that the first two albums - oh, and Rawlings has links to the Corning Gorilla Glass people :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrYg6Xz0DXg

Beautiful version of hashtag - thanks for sharing.

First listen last night and enjoyed it. It's almost got a sophistipop sheen to it in places, which I am very much here for. Rawlings-sung tunes are probably the weakest ones here.

they're going to reissue Time The Revelator and after that the first two albums - oh, and Rawlings has links to the Corning Gorilla Glass people :-)

📹

I know it's obtuse and basic to say this, but: when you have a voice like Welch's in the band, and a liquid, endlessly inventive guitarist like Rawlings, choosing to forego those things to have Dave sing simpler fingerpicked songs seems, I don't know, somehow bloody-minded to me. I get it, he's essential, they're equal partners, but hand on heart there is never a moment I'd prefer to hear him singing than her. Hashtag sure is a lovely song, but it quickens to life when Gill sings.
Also musicians don't obsess about sound quality because their hearing is often shot.

(that interviewer is Michael Fremer who's been an audio gear reviewer for 30+ years, first at Stereophile / Analog Planet and latterly Tracking Angle.)

I know it's obtuse and basic to say this, but: when you have a voice like Welch's in the band, and a liquid, endlessly inventive guitarist like Rawlings, choosing to forego those things to have Dave sing simpler fingerpicked songs seems, I don't know, somehow bloody-minded to me. I get it, he's essential, they're equal partners, but hand on heart there is never a moment I'd prefer to hear him singing than her. Hashtag sure is a lovely song, but it quickens to life when Gill sings.
Also musicians don't obsess about sound quality because their hearing is often shot.

OK I was just absolutely thunderstruck by "The Bells & the Birds". Astonishing, mesmerising song, it just crept up on me. These guys.

Saw Welch & Rawlings live last night ( occasionally joined by an acoustic bassist). I am a fan of Welch’s voice and her vocal harmonies with Rawlings and they seem like really nice folks. My folk music loving wife loved the show and is wowed by them. I enjoyed it but have determined I am not as wowed by their songwriting.

They did a 2 hour set with a break between the first and second hour

“We’re such a quiet band, we really use the room,” Welch says. “We can hear you guys. We don’t have in-ears in; we don’t have monitors blasting up at us,” she explains, naming two methods many touring musicians use to ensure they can hear themselves over the din of the crowd and their bandmates. “Our show changes every night depending upon the theater and the vibe of the crowd. By the time we get to the encore, we all know each other, and the night has usually coalesced into something. And we react to that in the encore.”

From recent interview in Washington Post

I saw them for the first time in Baltimore Saturday night. They played that rousing medley of Rawlings' "I Hear Them All" (which truly sounds like it could be a standard from the 1930s) and "This Land is Your Land." I wasn't aware a version of that was released on that Inside Llewyn Davis concert album a few years back. They also ended with a cover of "White Rabbit."

We almost went to that Baltimore gig, but went to last's night Virginia near DC gig instead. We did not get that medley. We did get "Time the Revelator" which I think someone who went to both shows says you did not get Saturday

here's the link to recent Wash Post interview by freelancer

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/12/04/gillian-welch-david-rawlings-concert-dc/

We didn't get "White Rabbit" either

I was at the Kingston NY show. Great time. Packed venue.

Tiny Desk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfGdjdxxOuU

always a treat to see these two play live

I haven't seen them live, but as for the xpost songwriting, as I said way upthread, was struck by the previously-unreleased megadumps re careful detail, brief scenes from a seeming variety of lives, which (I'll add) may assume different significance depending on how they are sung and played, from night to night: a thought which tempts me to follow them around like a Deadhead.

Deadhead, Dylanhead---I wonder if there are GillianandDaveheads---

Several years ago, a friend of mine mentioned them to his (singer-songwriter) son, who said, "Oh yeah, they stayed at my house." Dad: "Oh I would liked to have met them." What, if anything, his son replied is unrecorded by me, but he and his Dad like a lot of the same music, so if he reported everyone who stayed there etc.

"Oh I would have liked meeting them," more like

upthread:

(maaaan)Anybody jonesing for Gillian and Dave should check out Kieran Kane & Rayna Gellert:
https://kanegellert.bandcamp.com/album/the-flowers-that-bloom-in-spring

This is superb, thank you dow. Love the art, too.

― Indexed, Thursday, August 10, 2023 4:45 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

You're welcome! I like the art on the Bandcamp page too. This is something I just came across on there, still need to check the two previous duet albs they've posted. Every time I listen, it hits me a little harder, in that-low key way.

― dow, Thursday, August 10, 2023 9:03 PM

GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS PLAY GRATEFUL DEAD ACOUSTIC RECKONING TOUR DATES
April 9 - Port Chester, NY at The Capitol Theatre
April 10 - Port Chester, NY at The Capitol Theatre
April 11 - Port Chester, NY at The Capitol Theatre
April 17 - Oakland, CA at Fox Theater
April 18 - Oakland, CA at Fox Theater
April 23 - New Orleans, LA at Saenger Theatre
July 25 – Newport, RI at Newport Folk Festival

holy shit finally Grateful Dead songs with people who can sing