Gillian Welch & David Rawlings – Woodland
You can’t rush perfection, but sometimes an act of nature can help to hurry it along. Throughout most of their career, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have followed no schedule but the one they dictate themselves, having run their own Acony label since the early ’00s. And with that comes the implicit suggestion that new music arrives at the moment they’re ready for the rest of us to hear it. For Welch that sometimes means a 13-year gap between albums, her last set of original compositions being the stripped-down folk of 2011’s The Harrow and the Harvest. Though that gives something of a skewed perspective on how prolific the duo really are; that album was followed by pandemic covers album All the Good Times as well as a hearty 48-song box set of unreleased vault material and two records helmed by life and songwriting partner Rawlings. But a tornado that ripped through Tennessee in 2020 literally tore the roof off the duo’s studio and required them to undergo a last-minute rescue mission to save their equipment and masters before the building collapsed, bringing about a new sense of urgency for the pair that led to the creation of their latest set of songs.
Woodland, named for the duo’s studio, arrives after a period of rebuilding and renewed focus, the duo having pared down what they estimate as nearly 100 songs to 10. They even entertained the idea of releasing two companion albums at once, one with full-band arrangements and one a series of stark, acoustic ballads. The finished product is, instead, a merger of these two ideas and likewise the first full-length set of original songs to be credited to both Welch and Rawlings, underlining their work as an act of partnership and collaboration above all. As such the album gives the two artists a shared spotlight, Welch helming about two thirds of the album and Rawlings another handful, while their voices merge harmoniously throughout, as on the beautifully melancholy string-laden Americana of “What We Had.”
Welch and Rawlings offer some of their most richly arranged songs on Woodland, kicking off with leadoff track “Empty Trainload of Sky,” which while relatively understated is more layered and fleshed-out than the stark folk pieces on The Harrow and the Harvest. The solid foundation of a proper rhythm section is the most notable difference here—along with the simmering heat of Hammond organ—but as always the focus is on vocals and guitar, Welch gleaning existential despair from a landscape framed by boxcar: “Well it hit me and it hurt me/Made my good humor desert me/For a moment I was tempted to fly.” The moving “Hashtag,” a tribute to their late friend and inspiration Guy Clark, is delicately orchestrated with strings and horns beneath Rawlings’ elegiac reflections on a sad, ironic sign of the times, singing, “You laughed and said the news would be bad/If I ever saw your name with a hashtag/Singers like you and I are only news when we die.” And it only takes a light touch of violin and organ to make the Dylanesque vision of the apocalypse in “The Day The Mississippi Died” feel all the more soulful in its epic sprawl.
Yet it’s still often the sparser moments where Welch and Rawlings offer their most breathtaking material on Woodland. “Lawman,” a song that’s existed in some form since at least 2008, invokes the darkness of classic murder balladry and the haunted folk of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska with a nod to Leadbelly, Welch singing against an intricate interplay of guitars, “The big iron gonna rust, everything’s dust to dust/And lawman gonna kill my honey dead.” The chilling ambience of “The Bells and the Birds” evokes English folk and 21st century psych troubadours such as Espers rather than Americana in its gentle harmonics. It’s a unique centerpiece unto itself, among the most gorgeously eerie songs Welch and Rawlings have ever recorded.
The revelation that so much additional material was left on the cutting room floor suggests that there’s perhaps another album’s worth of material with the potential to see release, if not another Boots-like box set—along with the back-catalog material they’ve been meticulously mastering for vinyl (including Time (The Revelator) finally getting the pressing it’s long deserved). But more than simply reinforcing after a lengthy interval that Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ enchanting Americana is meticulously and breathtakingly crafted, it’s also the creation of a duo whose connection goes deeper than the music itself. Closer “Howdy, Howdy,” a stark guitar and banjo duet, finds them beautifully singing in harmony, “You and me are always gonna be howdy howdy/You and me always walk that lonesome valley.” It’s a chemistry that can’t be forced or manufactured, effortless because it’s real. Moments like these—simple, affecting and poignant—can’t be hurried. They can only happen when they happen.
Label: Acony
Year: 2024
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Gillian Welch & David Rawlings : Woodland
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