Woodland, the brand new album by Gillian Welch (left) and David Rawlings, is the newest in a protracted collaboration between two musicians who’ve constructed careers — and an influential legacy — out of the magnetic interaction between their voices and the energy of their musical concepts.
Alysse Gafkjen/Courtesy of the artist
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Alysse Gafkjen/Courtesy of the artist
A boxcar tips the attention. Atop its spinning wheels, no cargo, simply the bones of a freight framing the heavens, shot by means of with blue. That is how the brand new album from Gillian Welch and David Rawlings begins: with an illusory window to the past. “Empty Trainload of Sky” is an acoustic rock and roll miniature — the sort Welch and Rawlings perfected on their 2001 masterpiece Time (the Revelator) and have intentionally augmented with two guitars, two voices, rigidity, grace and resolve ever since. The momentum of this skeletal thriller prepare carries custom and infinity. Whether or not hole or full, containing nothing or all the pieces, it retains dashing ahead.
The unmoored structure of that spectral skylight has literal resonance for Welch and Rawlings. Woodland is called for the storied East Nashville studio they’ve owned for 23 years and the place, early in March 2020, a twister of Biblical proportions tore off the roof and threatened to capsize the entire of their life’s work. The storm left the pair knee-deep in water and pitch-black darkness as they risked their earthly existences to save lots of the supplies constituting their musical ones. Amid the guitars and kit had been the collected grasp tapes of their poised, literary songs courting again to the mid-Nineties, when Welch and Rawlings started distilling Nineteen Thirties nation and sharp-angled brother-team bluegrass and rural people into their very own austere sonic grammar — alchemizing ache into transcendence, dissolving standard time, placing Elvis and the Titanic into the identical America as a five-band punk invoice and mixing harmonies so chilling they’re mentioned to have made Townes Van Zandt howl like a wolf.
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Nearly all of Woodland’s songs of loss and resilience had been penned after the flood, tracked within the rebuilt studio with clarified stakes. Between them, Welch and Rawlings have launched eight earlier albums of their unique materials (plus a 2020 assortment of covers that set the likes of Bob Dylan’s “Deserted Love” beside traditionals and received a Grammy). Regardless of the headliner, each file has been a collaboration constructed round these awe-inducing unison notes discovered from a world lengthy gone, which really feel so corporally alive, you need to be a part of them, “sing that rock and roll.” Nonetheless, the haunted duets of 2011’s The Harrow & the Harvest had been the final new songs to bear Welch’s title on the quilt. Sufficient time has handed to make the full-band, short-story songs of Woodland an occasion, a brand new starting and a pillar befitting their more and more towering stature in music. Although they’ve lengthy contended that they’re members of a “two-piece band referred to as Gillian Welch” — a call instigated partially by their former file label, as ladies singer-songwriters had been changing into a ’90s phenomenon — Woodland is the primary album of originals attributed to Welch and Rawlings collectively.
Their idiosyncratic idiom — folk-arcana balladry between the Carter Household and traditional rock, a lonesome sound made palliative by the dream shared in a single microphone — steadies the soul whereas staring down despair, voicing intense humanity and an undercurrent of the unknown. It tends to return collectively at its personal tempo. In an August 2020 interview with the writer Hanif Abdurraqib, Welch mentioned that, after a interval of author’s block, she had lately reached for a guide on her shelf— the Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa’s fractured dream journal The E book of Disquiet — and browse a passage of “such stunning poignancy, such beautiful human precision” that “the impulse to write down, the necessity to grapple with this second has returned to me and grown from that little seed.” Welch and Rawlings have all the time made profoundly grounded music, however their songs have by no means felt so intimately attuned to their current occasions. That features their private realities in addition to the vexed sociopolitical tenor of a world astray, as when “Lawman” names an unrepentant satan and doomed gambler in its bluesy narration of a beloved who’s killed by the cops. Woodland’s bolder presence comes over in its pithy melodies and deep-breathing preparations, too. Finger-picked like chimes, “The Bells and the Birds” is a gently psychedelic hymn, its high-pitched harmonic texture portending the uneasiness of morning breaking. Its elegant stillness recasts the stoic calm on the core of most songs by Welch, whose personal mom as soon as mentioned her nice talent is to “listen.”
Most disarmingly, Welch and Rawlings sing candidly (it will appear — and even the gesture feels uncommon) of their very own partnership. The baroque-teardrop “What We Had” evokes the supersensitive ache of Neil Younger, pining for the purity of a relationship’s onset (or, maybe, the years earlier than the storm and the plague), with Welch and Rawlings buying and selling strains over strings that stream like river, just like the shifting panorama out the window. “We’ve been collectively since I don’t know when,” Rawlings sings in a near-falsetto on “Howdy Howdy,” earlier than Welch responds in a decrease register: “And the very best half’s the place one begins and the opposite ends.” On “Empty Trainload of Sky,” when she sings the phrase “faculty” in her greatest Dylan drawl, it feels like a intelligent nod to their genesis.
Welch and Rawlings met within the early ’90s on line to audition for the one nation ensemble at Boston’s Berklee Faculty of Music. They started courting, however after faculty was over, Welch took off for Nashville. Some weeks later, at summer season’s finish, Rawlings moved down, too. I couldn’t assist however recall these origins on repeat performs of “North Nation,” a bittersweet ballad of languid, long-distance craving by which Welch’s narrator is down in Tennessee, ready for the “season to melt” — then possibly she’d go to — remembering “fireflies after dinner.” This reverie of romance suspended in time would possibly in any other case be referred to as “Boy From the North Nation,” although actually, in its pedal-steel glimmer are the crooked-highway longing and sterling writing of “Tomorrow Is a Lengthy Time” or “Mama, You Been on My Thoughts.” Welch pierces her story of nascent love with plainspoken reality: “Some lengthy darkish night time, you would possibly ship me a letter / Stuffed with sleepless devilry / I’ll inform you now, we may very well be collectively / In case you ever get bored with being free.” This caliber of vulnerability feels good on the coronary heart of an album hinging on what Welch and Rawlings constructed collectively — a musical and private relationship guided by what they’ve described as “the identical North Star” — however one which can also be acutely aware of what could be misplaced.
The “we” of Woodland — “We may very well be collectively,” “We’ve been collectively,” “I solely need what we had” — turns into existential. “When will we develop into ourselves?” Rawlings sings within the chorus of “Hashtag,” a requiem for his or her good friend, the Texas troubadour Man Clark, who took Welch and Rawlings out on early excursions and died in 2016. Full of heartworn-highway realism of “truck stops” and “parking tons” and “low-cost motels,” and paying homage to Clark’s similar craftsmanship and heat knowledge, it’s an elegy befitting the outlaw who taught Welch and Rawlings the methods of the highway: poignant, comedian, absurd, hopeful, line good, largely life or dying.
In late July, Welch and Rawlings performed “Hashtag” — and almost all of Woodland — onstage at a tiny bar referred to as the Iron Horse in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was their second dwell set since 2018. We weren’t removed from the place the duo met at Berklee, and from the place Rawlings grew up in Rhode Island, and in that sense of homecoming, Welch and Rawlings had been free, witty, digging deep into songs, peering over their edges and past their horizons, touchdown them collectively. When the couple stand beside one another and carry out, they seem to see one thing we don’t — of their targeted eyes; of their voices melding like roses woven on the vine, like dappled daylight; in two guitars that develop into the engine and wings to a different airplane, the highwire cycles of Rawlings’ chromatic Epiphone-archtop choosing, the transfixing drone of Welch’s rhythm taking part in. (“I used to be just a bit Deadhead,” she as soon as sang, tellingly). The viewers grew to become a reverent choir for “Arduous Instances” and “Have a look at Miss Ohio” and “I’ll Fly Away” — traditional recordings of theirs that didn’t but exist once they’d first appeared on the Iron Horse within the ‘90s, opening for Clark, their vagabond mentor. “You laughed and mentioned the information can be dangerous / If I ever noticed your title with a hashtag,” Rawlings sings on “Hashtag,” his voice extra lucid than ever. “Singers such as you and I / Are solely information once we die.” The phrase “hashtag” could seem jarring within the eloquent Welch-Rawlings universe. However it helps make this presumably mournful music appropriately humorous, tying the previous to the current and future, a hyperlink within the chain by which Clark’s classes dwell on in Welch, Rawlings, and the youthful musicians they encourage.
Greater than ever, Welch has mentioned, they really feel a part of a continuum. Their affect has been the inheritance of youthful roots and nation giants but additionally a number of the sharpest pens in unbiased rock. Conor Oberst and Jenny Lewis have channeled that endowment for many years. Hurray for the Riff Raff’s feminist homicide ballad “The Physique Electrical” finds a precedent in Welch’s “Caleb Meyer” simply as Waxahatchee’s visceral folk-pop was blueprinted by Soul Journey, and the very syntax of Massive Thief is indebted to their oeuvre. Phoebe Bridgers helped flip “The whole lot Is Free,” Welch’s indictment of post-piracy artist exploitation, into a typical, and as soon as referred to as the assembly of Welch and Rawlings “a miracle.” Their songs develop into part of you as a result of they symbolize methods of being. Twenty-one years on, “Have a look at Miss Ohio” stays a balm to anybody dwelling off a straight path; “I wanna do proper however not proper now” redeems the very notion of life on a private timeline.
Simply because the wheels on “Hashtag”’s freeway maintain turning, the clock’s arms propel Woodland ahead. These songs comprise express signifiers of the previous, sure; typically Welch and Rawlings quote their heroes instantly, like an informal “hey hey my my” or “it’s alright ma.” Elsewhere, they allude extra obliquely to Leadbelly or “Danville Woman” or an outdated fiddle tune. However the songs’ temperature-checking tales, colloquial language and flowing hooks really feel patently present, rooted within the second, as with the dignity and soul of “Right here Stands a Girl,” the place, Welch sings, finishing her titular concept, “there as soon as was a lady.” Then once more, Welch mentioned in 2003: “Our stuff could be very forward-looking. Actually, if something, it’s largely about getting by means of the subsequent day.”
Transferring Woodland from sky to soil, “The Day the Mississippi Died” turns into a mountain music, and a centerpiece. You might image Levon Helm behind the mic of this fevered, down-home rallying cry, with its apocalyptic imaginative and prescient of the opioid disaster and local weather collapse, the place the “mighty” river dries up and neighbors nonetheless can’t broach their variations. “We will’t even argue / So what else can we do?” Welch sings, additional complicating that “we,” evoking the polarization of America with a uncommon air of indignation. Welch punctuates latest historical past with a transparent image of the world round her — and appears to allow us to into a personal alternate with Rawlings whereas catching a collective nerve:
I dug my arms deep into the black Mom Earth
Tried to lift my spirits up for what it’s value
You laughed and mentioned, Aw honey, now what did you count on?
Not these tears and nightmare years the place insanity goes unchecked
When will we develop into ourselves? Welch and Rawlings’ shared development on this monumental file is its personal reply. In The E book of Disquiet, Pessoa describes “a music in everybody’s soul that nobody is aware of.” Welch and Rawlings are nonetheless discovering them in tandem. Thirty-two years into their partnership, the method, like their everlasting songbook, goes on.
