A boxcar tricks the eye. Atop its spinning wheels, no cargo, just the bones of a freight framing the heavens, shot through with blue. This is how the new album from Gillian Welch and David Rawlings begins: with an illusory window to the beyond. “Empty Trainload of Sky” is an acoustic rock and roll miniature — the kind Welch and Rawlings perfected on their 2001 masterpiece Time (the Revelator) and have deliberately augmented with two guitars, two voices, tension, grace and resolve ever since. The momentum of this skeletal mystery train carries tradition and infinity. Whether hollow or full, containing nothing or everything, it keeps rushing forward.
The unmoored architecture of that spectral skylight has literal resonance for Welch and Rawlings. Woodland is named for the storied East Nashville studio they have owned for 23 years and where, early in March 2020, a tornado of Biblical proportions tore off the roof and threatened to capsize the whole 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 the materials constituting their musical ones. Amid the guitars and gear were the collected master tapes of their poised, literary songs dating back to the mid-1990s, when Welch and Rawlings began distilling 1930s country and sharp-angled brother-team bluegrass and rural folk into their own austere sonic grammar — alchemizing pain into transcendence, dissolving conventional time, putting Elvis and the Titanic into the same America as a five-band punk bill and blending harmonies so chilling they are said to have made Townes Van Zandt howl like a wolf.
Almost all of Woodland’s songs of loss and resilience were penned after the flood, tracked in the rebuilt studio with clarified stakes. Between them, Welch and Rawlings have released eight previous albums of their original material (plus a 2020 collection of covers that set the likes of Bob Dylan’s “Abandoned Love” beside traditionals and won a Grammy). No matter the headliner, every record has been a collaboration built around those awe-inducing unison notes learned from a world long gone, which feel so corporally alive, you want to join them, “sing that rock and roll.” Still, the haunted duets of 2011’s The Harrow & the Harvest were the last new songs to bear Welch’s name on the cover. Enough time has passed to make the full-band, short-story songs of Woodland an event, a new beginning and a pillar befitting their increasingly towering stature in music. Though they have long contended that they’re members of a “two-piece band called Gillian Welch” — a decision instigated in part by their former record label, as women singer-songwriters were becoming a ’90s phenomenon — Woodland is the first album of originals attributed to Welch and Rawlings together.
Their idiosyncratic idiom — folk-arcana balladry between the Carter Family and classic rock, a lonesome sound made palliative by the dream shared in one microphone — steadies the soul while staring down despair, voicing intense humanity and an undercurrent of the unknown. It tends to come together at its own pace. In an August 2020 interview with the author Hanif Abdurraqib, Welch said that, after a period of writer’s block, she had recently reached for a book on her shelf— the Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa’s fractured dream journal The Book of Disquiet — and read a passage of “such beautiful poignancy, such exquisite human precision” that “the impulse to write, the need to grapple with this moment has returned to me and grown from that little seed.” Welch and Rawlings have always made profoundly grounded music, but their songs have never felt so intimately attuned to their present times. That includes their personal realities as well as the vexed sociopolitical tenor of a world astray, as when “Lawman” names an unrepentant devil and doomed gambler in its bluesy narration of a beloved who is killed by the cops. Woodland’s bolder presence comes over in its pithy melodies and deep-breathing arrangements, 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 sublime stillness recasts the stoic calm at the core of most songs by Welch, whose own mother once said her great skill is to “pay attention.”
Most disarmingly, Welch and Rawlings sing candidly (it would seem — and even the gesture feels rare) of their own partnership. The baroque-teardrop “What We Had” evokes the supersensitive ache of Neil Young, pining for the purity of a relationship’s onset (or, perhaps, the years before the storm and the plague), with Welch and Rawlings trading lines over strings that flow like river, like the shifting landscape out the window. “We’ve been together since I don’t know when,” Rawlings sings in a near-falsetto on “Howdy Howdy,” before Welch responds in a lower register: “And the best part’s where one starts and the other ends.” On “Empty Trainload of Sky,” when she sings the word “college” in her best Dylan drawl, it sounds like a clever nod to their genesis.
Welch and Rawlings met in the early ’90s on line to audition for the only country ensemble at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. They began dating, but after school was over, Welch took off for Nashville. Some weeks later, at summer’s end, Rawlings moved down, too. I couldn’t help but recall these origins on repeat plays of “North Country,” a bittersweet ballad of languid, long-distance yearning in which Welch’s narrator is down in Tennessee, waiting for the “season to soften” — then maybe she’d visit — remembering “fireflies after dinner.” This reverie of romance suspended in time might otherwise be called “Boy From the North Country,” though really, in its pedal-steel glimmer are the crooked-highway longing and sterling writing of “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” or “Mama, You Been on My Mind.” Welch pierces her story of nascent love with plainspoken truth: “Some long dark night, you might send me a letter / Full of sleepless devilry / I’ll tell you now, we could be together / If you ever get tired of being free.” This caliber of vulnerability feels just right at the heart of an album hinging on what Welch and Rawlings built together — a musical and personal relationship guided by what they’ve described as "the same North Star" — but one that is also conscious of what can be lost.
The “we” of Woodland — “We could be together,” “We’ve been together,” “I only want what we had” — becomes existential. “When will we become ourselves?” Rawlings sings in the refrain of “Hashtag,” a requiem for their friend, the Texas troubadour Guy Clark, who took Welch and Rawlings out on early tours and died in 2016. Filled with heartworn-highway realism of “truck stops” and “parking lots” and “cheap motels,” and reminiscent of Clark’s same craftsmanship and warm wisdom, it’s an elegy befitting the outlaw who taught Welch and Rawlings the ways of the road: poignant, comic, absurd, hopeful, line perfect, mostly life or death.
In late July, Welch and Rawlings played “Hashtag” — and nearly all of Woodland — onstage at a tiny bar called the Iron Horse in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was their second live set since 2018. We were not far from where the duo met at Berklee, and from where Rawlings grew up in Rhode Island, and in that sense of homecoming, Welch and Rawlings were loose, witty, digging deep into songs, peering over their edges and beyond their horizons, landing them together. When the couple stand beside each other and perform, they appear to see something we don’t — in their focused eyes; in their voices melding like roses woven on the vine, like dappled sunlight; in two guitars that become the engine and wings to another plane, the highwire cycles of Rawlings’ chromatic Epiphone-archtop picking, the transfixing drone of Welch’s rhythm playing. (“I was just a little Deadhead,” she once sang, tellingly). The audience became a reverent choir for “Hard Times” and “Look at Miss Ohio” and “I’ll Fly Away” — classic recordings of theirs that did not yet exist when they’d first appeared at the Iron Horse in the ‘90s, opening for Clark, their vagabond mentor. “You laughed and said the news would be bad / If I ever saw your name with a hashtag,” Rawlings sings on “Hashtag,” his voice more lucid than ever. “Singers like you and I / Are only news when we die.” The word “hashtag” may seem jarring in the eloquent Welch-Rawlings universe. But it helps make this possibly mournful song appropriately funny, tying the past to the present and future, a link in the chain by which Clark’s lessons live on in Welch, Rawlings, and the younger musicians they inspire.
More than ever, Welch has said, they feel part of a continuum. Their influence has been the inheritance of younger roots and country giants but also some of the sharpest pens in independent rock. Conor Oberst and Jenny Lewis have channeled that endowment for decades. Hurray for the Riff Raff’s feminist murder ballad “The Body Electric” finds a precedent in Welch’s “Caleb Meyer” just as Waxahatchee’s visceral folk-pop was blueprinted by Soul Journey, and the very syntax of Big Thief is indebted to their oeuvre. Phoebe Bridgers helped turn “Everything Is Free,” Welch’s indictment of post-piracy artist exploitation, into a standard, and once called the meeting of Welch and Rawlings “a miracle.” Their songs become a part of you because they represent ways of being. Twenty-one years on, “Look at Miss Ohio” remains a balm to anyone living off a straight path; “I wanna do right but not right now” redeems the very notion of life on a personal timeline.
Just as the wheels on “Hashtag”’s highway keep turning, the clock’s hands propel Woodland forward. These songs contain explicit signifiers of the past, yes; sometimes Welch and Rawlings quote their heroes directly, like an off-the-cuff “hey hey my my” or “it’s alright ma.” Elsewhere, they allude more obliquely to Leadbelly or “Danville Girl” or an old fiddle tune. But the songs’ temperature-checking tales, colloquial language and flowing hooks feel patently current, rooted in the moment, as with the dignity and soul of “Here Stands a Woman,” where, Welch sings, completing her titular idea, “there once was a girl.” Then again, Welch said in 2003: “Our stuff is very forward-looking. Really, if anything, it’s largely about getting through the next day.”
Moving Woodland from sky to soil, “The Day the Mississippi Died” becomes a mountain song, and a centerpiece. You could picture Levon Helm behind the mic of this fevered, down-home rallying cry, with its apocalyptic vision of the opioid crisis and climate collapse, where the “mighty” river dries up and neighbors still cannot broach their differences. “We can’t even argue / So what else can we do?” Welch sings, further complicating that “we,” evoking the polarization of America with a rare air of indignation. Welch punctuates recent history with a clear picture of the world around her — and seems to let us into a private exchange with Rawlings while catching a collective nerve:
I dug my hands deep into the black Mother Earth
Tried to raise my spirits up for what it’s worth
You laughed and said, Aw honey, now what did you expect?
Not these tears and nightmare years where madness goes unchecked
When will we become ourselves? Welch and Rawlings’ shared growth on this monumental record is its own answer. In The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa describes “a song in everyone’s soul that no one knows.” Welch and Rawlings are still finding them in tandem. Thirty-two years into their partnership, the process, like their eternal songbook, goes on.
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