GILLIAN WELCH AND DAVID RAWLINGS
Woodland (Acony)
“What do they say to you my love?/Are they rejoicing or are they grieving?”
To answer the question posed by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings on the first album of original songs credited to both names, seven years since their last album of new songs as David Rawlings (or Dave Rawlings Machine), and almost twice as long since their last album as Gillian Welch: unquestionably rejoicing.
And that’s not just because it’s been a while, notwithstanding some fabulous excavations from their vaults in their Boots series. This is a tender and beautiful record of folk and country’s fertile common ground, surprisingly lush in parts but nonetheless centred on their voices and guitars, and tuned to more than the temper of the times, but to something like the deeper moment.
In their singular and joined voices, loss and love, division and reconciliation – both personal and societal – and joy, not something often dug out of their songs, are navigated as equals and treated with care, and the only complaint may be that there aren’t more songs than the 10.
Within those 10 there are nods vocal, melodic and lyrical to heroes and contemporaries, from Guy Clark, Lead Belly and Bob Dylan to Neil Young, Alison Krauss and Woody Guthrie. The references are as timeless as the cold of the north country, the League Of Women and the physical and cultural barriers dividing the country, and as timely and potent as covid, hashtag fears and the physical and cultural barriers dividing the country.
“For a moment I was tempted to fly/To the Devil or the Lord/As it hung there like a sword/Just an empty trainload of sky”
The stories are set in cheap motel and parking lots, along the length of the Mississippi and by a railway track, in homes where the curtains hide lives falling apart and homes where commitments are bone-deep and lifelong. The likelihood of a not-so-stray policeman’s bullet that will “kill my honey dead” haunts one woman’s life, another woman looks at herself in the mirror, weighing up the living reflected there, and finds on balance in the positive, friends mourn but with humour a man who now “tells his tale and shows his scars from here to Hollywood to waitresses and actresses and princes who preside over everything you thought was gone for good”, and a couple of old singers, the kind who only make the news “when we die” chuckle over the fact that “the news would be bad if I ever saw your name with a hashtag”.
Every one of these songs are small, local and personal even when encompassing the fractures of the wider world, so that the regrets feel close, the loves intimate and no one gets left behind. And the closeness of the sound reinforces this.
There are no voices but theirs, as ever contrasting in one moment and entwined in another, hers lower, his higher, but sometimes just one. And Rawlings’ guitar remains a thing of delicacy and earthiness, soaring above her rhythm and then pulling back behind it, dancing in front and holding beneath her shapes. But this album doesn’t restrict itself to their guitars and voices, and with slide and pedal steel, not just their acoustic guitars, taking up where the fuller-sounding Dave Rawlings Machine records left off.
The strings in What We Had are paired with Rawlings’ reaching, Young-ish voice to bring some subtle elegance to the west coast casual, while The Day Mississippi Died pairs those back to just a single violin, and where North Country’s sturdy acoustics intersect with pedal steel like roots growing around each other, the more keening strings of Hashtag bring some theatre to a lyric whose drama can be more easily missed within its light humour and calm.
Even without the more obvious additions, the sensibility of the arrangements seeps through your understanding. In The Bells And The Birds the sonic atmosphere is somewhere between pastoral and a Bristolian hazy mood – not quite Portishead, but you can just about see it through the trees – while the harmonica engaging with the guitars in Turf The Gambler holds the song between the twin poles of Lubbock and Greenwich Village-goes-to-Nashville. And there is something about Here Stands A Woman, beyond the languorous delivery and even more relaxed tempo, that stretches time wide and long.
If Woodland – named after the couple’s studio and archive, which came very close to disastrous destruction in Nashville’s 2020 cyclonic storm – was long in coming, it has not been time wasted. Once more, Welch and Rawlings find a path travelled on yet anything but worn, and you just want to follow.
“Last time, last rhyme, one more for the road/One more for the road/You and me are always gonna be howdy howdy/You and me always walk that lonesome valley.”
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