The latest album from Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Woodland, begins with a sound that wouldn’t be at all unfamiliar to those of us who know their previous work. During the opener, “Empty Trainload of Sky,” Welch sings lilting, steady-eyed lead, handsomely matched by Rawlings’ harmonies, and his restless, flat-picked guitar lines dart out ahead of the rhythm section’s understated ambling.
But the very next track, “What We Had,” swells with the orchestrated urbanity of ‘70s soft rock. It’s a notable departure for a singing, songwriting duo known for putting rustic musical elements to virtuosic use across the nine other albums they’ve released under one or both of their names, as well as archival collections and soundtracks, including “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
“I wanted people to be so scared after track two,” Rawlings says with satisfaction at a table in the reception area of the duo’s East Nashville studio, whose name they used as their album title. They even shot the cover image right out front.
‘We really don’t like to be stopped by external forces’
So much of their past work has seemed to transcend the specifics of their time and place, and made its way into the canon of folksong. “People think we’re talking about times gone by,” says Welch of their reputation, “but it’s not true. That’s just a folk language that we use to express ourselves.” She and Rawlings ever so subtly placed a different sort of frame around Woodland, and at the center is the creative domain they’ve painstakingly fashioned. Their studio, where they recorded themselves, is its most tangible symbol, and it also houses the lathe they used to cut the album and the offices of their label, Acony, which released it. None of that could happen until they completed significant repairs to the building in the wake of the 2020 tornado, an act of God that amounted to the rare outside interference in their singular career.
“I think we’re really stubborn people and we really don’t like to be stopped by external forces,” Welch observes.
“Or forced to compromise in some way that we don’t like,” Rawlings seconds.
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They’ve become the venerated contemporary archetype of a folk duo, and the recipients of the Americana Music Association’s lifetime achievement award for songwriting. It’s easy to forget how unorthodox they seemed when they first arrived in Nashville in the early 1990s.
With their conservatory training from Berklee College of Music, they could’ve pursued any number of musical directions. But what captured their imaginations was the clever craft of folk singer-songwriters who came after Bob Dylan and, especially, the rawboned power of the old-time brother duos that preceded the bluegrass boom.
“I remember saying, ‘Well, this isn’t a field that’s been plowed out all the way,’ ” Rawlings reflects. “ ‘They did it for a little while in the ‘30s and they kind of moved on.’ So it felt like there was maybe some ground to cover.”
But this was peak Garth Brooks era, when Nashville production and ambition was ballooning in scale. The Americana music scene hadn’t fully coalesced yet. “What we were doing, it seemed like a terrible idea, I mean, in the face of everything that was happening,” says Rawlings.
He and Welch’s lean, acoustic style set them apart at Nashville writers’ rounds, and the combination of their peculiarity and undeniable promise led to publishing and record deals.
‘It’ll be the two of us’
As they learned how the industry operated, they steered toward self-sufficiency instead.
“We were booked to do a show in Boston,” he says. “It was a winter show and we were going to fly up.”
That’s a go-to strategy for touring artists who need to cover a vast distance for a one-off performance. But while they were in the air, the weather grew increasingly rough.
“And they turned the plane around,” she says. “Sent us home, after circling the airport for three hours.”
“Basically,” he concludes, “that’s why we decided, ‘It’ll be the two of us.”
As in, the two of them driving themselves to shows, where they’d rely only on the intricate interplay between their voices and guitars. “Not being like, ‘OK, we wrote the song and it’ll be great when we have the string section with us,’ ” Rawlings clarifies. “It was like, ‘No, we have to be able to do it.”
That’s the mindset that the two applied to other aspects of their career. To buying back the rights to their first two T Bone Burnett-produced albums, Revival and Hell Among the Yearlings, and starting their own label; taking out loans to secure the studio, so they could operate on their own schedule; making improvements to the building by hand; and eventually, setting up their own vinyl cutting and pressing operations.
“A lot of stuff we do,” Welch says with a small chuckle, “we do it the quote unquote ‘hard way’ in other people’s eyes. But it’s the only way that it works for us.”
‘You make it what you want it to be’
She summons to mind a conversation she had in the early 2000s with progressive bluegrass great Peter Rowan, just after she and Rawlings had purchased Woodland. At the time, she wasn’t at all confident that their professional and artistic risks would pay off in the long run. “I said something about Nashville and how I felt like a freak,” she recalls. “And [Rowan] said, ‘No, you are Nashville. You make it what you want it to be.’ And he meant it, because he saw that we had put down roots here.”
By forging an insular space for their own music-making, Rawlings and Welch really have helped bring into being the musical world that they want to inhabit here — a world where sophisticated originality and reviving time-tested forms hold equal value. In light of that investment, the impact of the 2020 tornado registered with them in an intimate way. The feeling of even temporarily losing their place influenced the songs they laid down there, once they could again. This time, the melancholy in Welch and Rawlings’ lyrics felt slightly more personal than in the past.
“Some of the stuff did feel more confessional in a way,” he says. “There is a less guarded-ness to some of this writing, where if it felt direct, we didn’t do anything to try to couch it.”
“We didn’t transmogrify it into folk speak,” she affirms.
At the same time, they’ve grown increasingly appreciative that so many other performers — mainstream country stars, bluegrass groups and indie rockers alike, and spanning several generations — have taken up their material
“Of course, the highest compliment is another musician deciding to play your song,” says Welch.
Rawlings picks up the thought: “I would actually say that the highest compliment is when you’re walking by a campfire somewhere and another, like, nonprofessional musician is playing your song.”
They still remember the first time that happened in the ‘90s. Someone singing their song “Orphan Girl” — a pining, Appalachian-sounding expression of profound aloneness that just can’t be salved in this life, now one of the most treasured entries in their catalog — awakened them from a pre-show nap.
“It still astounds me,” marvels Welch. “It’s still almost like magic to me that the songs go out into the world and they do things and they have these lives, lives that we rarely know.”
Even after nearly 30 years in the spotlight, the musical life she and Rawlings share retains its own compelling mystique.
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