GILLIAN WELCH AND DAVID RAWLINGS
Sydney Opera House, January 23
SOMETIMES IT REALLY IS the little bits, what might for others be afterthoughts, that serve to explain it all, to sneak under your guard and seal the deal. And Gillian Welch and David Rawlings – stage bare but for a table, and guitars unplugged; harmonica and banjo the only extras, and a show broken up with an old-fashioned interval – are the gods of small things.
In these two hours there were plenty of showcase moments, the kind of fill your soul or gasp with joy and awe things you will be talking about weeks later. Years later.
Maybe it was when, with Rawlings in full Neil Young high and vulnerable mode and Welch the croon beneath, they seemed to hover above the pools of sadness in What We Had. “I used to dream of something unseen/It was something that I thought I wanted so bad/Now I only want/What we had, what we had, what we had.”
Or any of those times his guitar playing simultaneously operated as lead and rhythm and engine and caboose and dancer and mourner, like the urgent solo in Ruby, a song where he shifted gears through Young to one of the Louvin brothers. Man, this bloke can play.
Possibly it was how in Wayside/Back In Time, Welch’s voice was languid and deceptively effortless, drawing out each word like in molasses drawl and yet levitating it like it was a puff of air, and how in I Want To Sing That Rock And Roll she made it a song that rolls down the hill towards us, measured and smooth, but still hinting at a willingness to break from the path given half a chance.
Or when in the wandering vine of a folk song that is The Day The Mississippi Died, she almost made physical the lines “Way up on the Erie, they like their chops so far/I've seen the League of Women lick their fingers like a cat”. Damn, this woman can sing.
And definitely it was found in the way they made Revelator a wind coming through the trees, distant then tender then disquieting, building to a storm – her head bowed over her guitar being worked over, his body twisting around the guitar that was itself twisting in his hands, sparking flares – that blew itself out in exultation rather than exhaustion.
But with even less fanfare there were these little wonders that accumulated.
The way their voices slot into each other like dovetailed wood in Orphan Girl; how Make Me A Pallet On The Floor was the gentle aftermath of the storm that was Revelator; the laugh and truth in his line, after she told us of her visit to the Botanic Gardens to see the corpse flower, that “a lot of our songs are about botany and death”; the joy on their faces and ours when Welch cleared the floor for ham bone and clogging in Six White Horses; the way his bent strings made for a skipping energy you could see reflected in her right foot doing a swishing step throughout Midnight Train.
Yes, they sent us out on a cloud of satisfaction and connection and pleasure with the emotional lift of I’ll Fly Away, but the win was already theirs. In the big and the small things.
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings play:
Sydney Opera House, January 25
Melbourne Arts Centre, January 28-31 and February 2
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A version of this review was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald
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