How Gillian Welch and David Rawlings stayed optimistic (published in 2020) (2023)

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As we enter another season of our individual and collective solitude, it seems almost cruel to be reminded of the power of live music. But if at any point in the past you've been lucky enough to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings live, chances are you've experienced that homecoming feeling that two artists who genuinely love being on stage together can deliver an enthralled audience .

Welch and Rawlings have been singing together since the early '90s, and on stage each can tell what the other needs with a quick glance or a foot tip. This level of trust extends outward, drawing the audience into a closed circle of intimacy. Welch sings her whole face: When a song leans toward joy, she can't help but smile, and when a song leans toward sadness, she comes across as thoughtful, sometimes heartbroken, sometimes resigned to whatever fate may be . But his voice is steady and clear, always. It resonates in the heart first: Sing as if in sorrow or prepare to cry. Rawlings is the livelier of the two: he's tall, athletic, and energetic. When he plays his guitar, his entire torso twists and turns in small but violent movements. Their combined voices go beyond simple tonal harmony. It's about emotional issues. Whether Welch's voice brings good news or bad news to the world, Rawlings' voice appears below, asking how much deeper sadness can go or what new heights ecstasy can reach.

I saw them in Virginia in the fall of 2018 at an open-air concert that was stormy at times. A crowd of a few hundred people tumbled into a vast field, our feet sinking into the muddy grass. About halfway through the show they played the song "Hard Times" which is etched into my memory. The tune is superficially about overcoming the ills of the world: a man plows and sings to his mule until he stops plowing and one day the mule disappears. It's a patient and soulful song filtered through a vague but believable promise of something better. Especially when played live it feels like tending to an open wound that is slowly closing inch by inch.

As they sang, it began to rain and the audience drew closer as the mud billowed around us. Welch managed the first two-thirds of "Hard Times" solo, playing a banjo and presenting the facts of the landscape and the characters within. Rawlings was a little behind her, rocking softly and maybe strumming a guitar string or two. He showed almost visible restraint, vibrating with anticipation. Then Welch's line "We all get to heaven in our own sweet time" seemed to activate Rawlings, transforming the song from a distant but tangible story into immediate instruction for a listener who may be gripped by fear and wanting to break free. .

If they understood the line "And kick until the dust comes out of the cracks in the floor" correctly, then at the word "up" they instinctively lifted their feet and lowered them simultaneously. That's the magic of her acting, making little moments romantic. They sing like they're unveiling a secret that might not save your life forever, but it will definitely save it now. I miss performances of songs that seem like the birth of entire planets. At Welch and Rawlings, you might get that feeling five or six times a night.

When I met Welch and Rawlings in August, they were as warm-hearted as their shows led me to hope, but there were also qualms as we stood six feet apart to chat. Welch and Rawlings, like myself and many others, don't hang out with a lot of people during the spring and summer.

We were in a massive room at Woodland Studios, the duo's base of operations in East Nashville, a neighborhood badly hit by a tornado in March, just before the pandemic confined much of the country to our homes. "If you look up," Welch said, pointing to a roof patched haphazardly with what appeared to be wood, "you can see where we didn't have a roof." The building was once the Woodland Theater before becoming a studio where the likes of Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson released up-tempo folk and country hits. Rawlings and Welch, who are also married, bought the building about two decades ago after it was nearly destroyed by another tornado and later condemned by the city.

Welch, dressed all in black (including his mask), carefully paced the room as if seeing it again with new eyes, calmly laying out the damage. In March, Welch and Rawlings rode through the storm from their home next to the now uncovered studio to salvage their equipment and, more importantly, their master recordings. When it rained, they had to move things for almost 10 hours: boxes of records, boxes of guitars. At that time there was no electricity or cell service and no way to contact anyone. It was just the two of you and a friend living in the studio trying to salvage what they could, lighting up the darkness with dying lanterns.

"Dave and I have literally saved every part of our world physically," Welch said, "and that begs the question, why did I save that? What is its value? What should I do with it? Her voice was low and thoughtful, as if she were no longer speaking to me but to herself. "I thought this was all safe forever?"

For the couple, the months following the tornado and pandemic led to, perhaps unexpectedly, increased production. They released All the Good Times, an album of old folk songs, in early July and will spend the rest of the year making Boots No studio.fluted (first volume out mid-July). It's different from Welch and Rawlings to put out so much music at once: 58 songs in half a year, seven more than Welch's five studio albums combined. But as the country headed for new depths of uncertainty, Welch and Rawlings discovered a new emotional urgency. Once again they return to what they know: songs about the slow, defiant, beautiful heat of life, about people who have to make tough decisions on the road to good.

"Gillian writes in a way that sounds like it's from the 19th century," singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers tells me. “Everything is so rich and so rooted. The songs feel timeless, even though they're so genre-based." Rawlings and Welch, aged 50 and 53, respectively, have influenced songwriters of their own generation as well as younger songwriters searching for folk music, or even those around them. Bridgers is one of many examples of younger artists to be inspired by the duo (he often covers the song 'Everything Is Free.') "The union of Welch and Rawlings," Bridgers told me over the phone, "is a dream come true It's a miracle they found each other: These two people are obsessed with writing, recording and making things right. They almost became one."

Welch and Rawlings recorded "All the Good Times" on their couch in the early months of the pandemic, flipping through an old book of popular songs they loved from their days at Berklee College of Music in the early '90s. an uninvited guest at your party. The recordings are rare, so rare that the emotion lies not in the instrumentation itself, but in the slow crawling of two voices trying to find themselves in the realm of a chorus or crescendo. The best reviews are the ones that hurt, like the title track slowing down Ralph Stanley's version. The song is about breaking up with a lover, but when Rawling's voice comes through the door with the lyrics, "I wish God had never been born/died when I was young," it's so heartbreaking it suddenly becomes a eulogy for a whole will land. . A whole world as we knew it. And that's the trick with All the Good Times: find new and unknown wounds in these old and familiar songs.

The final song on "All the Good Times" is "Y'all Come," a song recorded by Bill Monroe that's simply about hanging out with friends and neighbors. His version is slightly slower than Monroe's but still maintains the same jubilant tone. When I mentioned his version, Welch smiled crookedly. "It's weird, right now," he said, shaking his head slightly and waving one hand out into the great outdoors. "It's like, 'You guys come visit us if you can. We're not going anywhere.'”

It started raining,and our plan to sit and talk at a table and chairs overlooking Rawlings and Welch's backyard fell through. We huddled under an awning on the side of his house as the storm pounded in rhythm above him. Freed from the masks that once adorned our faces, Welch and Rawlings began to converse more easily. Rawlings is often delightfully tangential: confident enough to know he's tangent but too excited to hold back, the way music lovers can be when they feel like they've met someone new to joke with . Welch speaks with the way he writes, the way he sings, with deeply controlled reflection layered with down-to-earth honesty. While we were talking about some of our singing and writing heroes, Welch addressed Bob Dylan. "I don't know what I'm going to do after he's gone," she told me, pausing to gaze into the rain-soaked distance. "I can't even talk about it."

Welch and Rawlings are writers, but they are generous enough to open many doors: They don't write simple songs, but rather complex songs that are easy for any listener to find. They are also nostalgic, not only in an aesthetic sense, but in a very practical sense. In their lyrics they wink at the heroes of their past and the friends of their present. In the fourth verse of "I Dream a Highway," the sprawling 15-minute closing song of"Time (The Revealer)",from 2001, Welch sings: "What lover are you, Jack of Diamonds? Now you're Emmylou and I'm going to be a grandmother.

Emmylou Harris has made a career of many talents, but one of them is her versatility as a duet partner, particularly, as Welch and Rawlings say in the song, with Gram Parsons in the early '70s. But also with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt on two albums as a trio and sometimes in the last two decades with Welch himself.

"Most singers, most people that I hang out with, love to sing together," Harris told me over the phone when asked about the roots Welch and Rawlings are constantly exploring. But there's a certain joy in finding what she called "that perfect third voice." She compared it to dancing. “You don't have to be quick; You just join someone else.

Harris insists Welch and Rawlings stayed so strong as a team because they played music, regardless of whether anyone was listening. "They are so pure without being precious," she says. "They're punk in their own way."

Both have suffered a lot this year. In the middle of a studio remodel, in the middle of a pandemic, they're stuck at home formatting old songs they made, old songs they love. Maybe it's an opportunity to experience a different version of your adulthood, a different version of a world that could have been better, or at least a little more promising.

When the rain subsided, Welch and Rawlings told me about the origins of "Boots No. Two". It is a collection of songs surviving after recording in December 2002, born out of an eager desire to fulfill a contract. In 1994, shortly after moving to Nashville, Welch secured a publishing deal that was signed by required him to produce a certain number of songs each year. She owed more than 30 songs, but as her own career took off, she was desperate to get out of the business. Rawlings had a simple idea: if the company needed songs, the duo would they deliver. Over the course of a weekend – " ALargoWeekend,” Welch clarified: The duo wrote 48 songs.

"I draw college-lined spiral notebooks, and there were just a lot of them," Welch told me. "Dave flipped through the notebook, found a competitor, wrote it down, brought it to me and said, 'These are unfinished lyrics and music.' And he would try to end it when he came back with another. Like an assembly line.

They recorded the songs, but not as actual recordings, just to document them. The tapes have been lying around for 18 years and most of the songs have never been heard by anyone. After salvage after the storm, they were remastered.

"Boots No. 2” got me thinking about what Harris was saying: It sounds a bit like a punk record, not only because of the fast and somewhat mischievous nature of the recording, but also because of its rhythm. The songs are certainly done and immensely sharp, but they're faster than the usual Rawlings-Welch experience. Many of them are only two minutes long: tightly packed narratives, sprints rather than a single marathon.

"Often we're working with a very small core of a thought or idea and trying to keep the focus there," says Rawlings. "And one of my favorite things about writing in general is that you get just as upset as anyone else." He also described his process as "water running down a slope. Always follow the same path. And it's a path that we think is beautiful."

In "First Place Ribbon," which is only two minutes long, listeners are taken to a carnival, past a kissing booth, with a character they seem to have known for a long time. There are songs about the vast emptiness of a road that looks like a road you know and have traveled. Songs about bad men trying to do good to get out of a bad place. There's no concern for cleanliness or dissolution; Sometimes the song just ends. As with Bruce Springsteen's "Atlantic City," a scene is set, the stakes are decided, and life within the song must go on without an audience present to watch it unfold. There is generosity in that too. An ability to slow in a way that allows for some flexing of the imagination. So the music lives on in your head for hours after it has died down.

the best duosand duet singers understand that creating harmony is sometimes a series of musical negotiations, sometimes a series of personal negotiations, sometimes both. For example, if you're Daryl Hall and John Oates, who still tour for hits but aren't particularly interested in creating new work, musical negotiation trumps everything else. If you're Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel in the early '70s, competing ambitions force the personal relationship to shatter, despite the brilliance of the production. When you're Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, deals are made by fate whether you like it or not (Parsons died in 1973 at the age of 26). When you're Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, you almost feel predestined, like they've traveled to each other all along.

When I was 9 years old I was playing James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel songs. As she got to the end of the books and expected more songs, she realized she could write her own. At the age of 10 he started making his first notebook. After graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz with an arts degree, Welch traveled to Europe. He thought he would stay abroad for a while and only play for his own pleasure, but his parents had other plans. "Well, they thought I'd never come home," she says. "So, partly to get me to come back and to realize that I was a little bit lost, they offered to pay me for a year of music school." Welch went to Berklee in Boston.

Raised in North Smithfield, RI, Rawlings had a slower start to his musical aspirations. Or, understanding that Welch's start was exceptional, one could say that Rawlings had a normal start. "I didn't pick up a guitar until I was 16," he tells me. "It was the time in the '70s when this urban cowboy thing was happening in country music. And then there were things like, you know, Kenny Rogers, some of those things had come out. Like Jim Croce. And if it was a story song, I'd memorize the words and sing them in my head all the time. I wanted an instrument to play them. Rawlings and his family went to a Catholic church where elders "on the hippie side of things" played 12-string guitars during mass. But when Rawlings finally got his own guitar, he recovered quickly because his fingers were very nimble from a childhood of obsessive video games. "I've always been pretty systematic about the things I wanted to improve," says Rawlings. "And there were things he enjoyed, like playing basketball, where he knew there was a limit no matter how hard he tried. And I think as soon as I picked up the guitar I realized maybe I don't have a top." He also ended up enrolling at Berklee.

In the early '90s, Berklee wasn't exactly teeming with folk and roots musicians. “It was always just 19 guys on electric guitar and then me,” says Welch. "There was a whole school-wide roots-country set, and we both auditioned and got in."

Both Rawlings and Welch speak of a moment that decided their partnership a month or two after they left Berklee and moved to Nashville in 1992. They were in Rawlings' kitchen. Knowing they shared a common interest in duets, they began fumbling with their guitars and belting out the classic "Long Black Veil." They immediately felt the bones of something good, potential, which they refined until it was fully realized. Rawlings tells me, "If you have the same North Star as someone else and you try to go in the same direction, something will click."

There's the musical definition of harmony, but there's also a part of that definition, 'a beautiful arrangement of voices', that can be attributed to the emotional, the personal. When a duo really pushes itself, like Welch and Rawlings did, there's a lot at stake. Many things can go wrong if one person does not offer the other mercy, generosity, or the ability to meet halfway no matter how dark the road. Welch and Rawlings have a clear understanding of when to give each other space and when to collapse. And when they collide, it's not like they're jostling each other in a ground fight. More often than not, it seems like two people from two different rooms in the same house are telling the exact same story.

Welch and Rawlingsthey are certainly not at the end of their careers; In fact, Welch insisted, "I think we're just getting good at what we're doing now." But there was also a real and tangible loss to the world of music that orbited them.The pandemic took John Prine,an artist the duo covered on "All the Good Times." A few days before the meeting, news from folk singersJustin Townes Earle dies at the age of 38shook the city. Welch and Rawlings played with Earle on tour.

Faced with the general question of time, work and age, both paused and contemplated the weight of their inheritance as the rain slowly returned in the backyard. Wel smiled sadly as he discussed how Levon Helm, the band's drummer, told the duo that every time they played with him, the three should form a band. And then, as if remembering at the same time, the two fell into a story. "Time (The Revelator)" was in the running for an American Music Association Award in 2002. Welch and Rawlings had to perform that night and found themselves in a particularly difficult situation when they realized they had to follow Johnny Cash and June Carter in singing. Raggedy Old Flag".

"I remember Johnny being so fragile," Rawlings said. “He had to climb three of those little aluminum ladders that they put on the edge of such silly old sets. And you've gone up those three steps and you're still a bit in the shadows. One step down that staircase, out of shadow into light, he just turned into Johnny Cash. He sat up and he lifted his chest and he went to this microphone and it was Johnny Cash. It was incredibly moving to see someone born to act and to be a person. This was related to his personality. But I could see it wasn't, it wasn't...

Welch paved the way for the opening: "It wasn't all his."

"Being an artist is something you bring and wear," added Rawlings.

"It doesn't mean you aren't," Welch said. “It can be the highest part of you. But you don't always use it.

An unspoken fear hangs over our conversation. The night before was Saturday. Live music blew faintly from a few half-full bars on the streets of Nashville; others were closed. Some had indications that there might be an opening on the horizon; others didn't seem so lucky. Streets were busier in some cases when the C.D.C. introduced. I wanted to, but there was a hidden purpose. A cacophonous city interrupted by near silence.

Welch and Rawlings have spent much of their careers on the road and understand that their music is best received when people cheer them on. They tour without much glamour, throw everything they need in the car and drive across the country. They talk romantically across the street. Neither do the shows. The very literal road: the roads they've driven or the things they've seen through car windows. Of course, being on the road is another opportunity to collect stories. To deliver some more stones from America and see what's underneath.

But when I asked if they were looking forward to showing up again, Rawlings paused before answering. "Maybe there's a little shift in perspective and a realization that the recorded work will outlive the live show." Welch made a more specific point on this. "Not to be mean, but eventually your skills will start to dwindle."

In a perfect world, Welch said, he would write more, and in a non-cyclical way, detached from the rigors of touring. There's just one problem, Welch told me: he hasn't been able to write since the March tornado. And somehow it all started to make sense. This immersion in a book of old folk songs, this revival of an old but brilliant work. Yes, of course tragedy creates urgency, but also uncertainty about who you are when you're not doing what you're good at. And then I wondered out loud if maybe they felt like they had nothing to say for the time being. Welch rejected the idea almost immediately.

"I don't think it's possible to have nothing left to say," he said. As he previously said, "I need to know what I'm thinking about something and get to the other side to have the final verse." A few weeks later, Welch texted me an update: "About a month ago, a book that had been sitting unread on my shelf for some time caught my eye,"The Book of Unrest"by Fernanda Pessoa. I picked it up and read at random a passage of such moving beauty, with such exquisite human precision, that the wonder of creative expression overwhelmed me. I didn't tell anyone but I kept it to myself and the urge to write, the need to deal with that moment came back to me and grew from that little seed.

It was getting late in Nashville, and even the Cicadas were singing as if trying to land a record deal: loud, harmonic chunks of sound smashing on top of each other. We had to get a little closer to listen to each other in the chorus, back and forth about what Welch called the "little details" of writing they love; how they would write and form a sentence and how the sentence would slowly unravel into something larger. This part of our conversation almost felt like they were both on stage: relieved and happy to pursue a higher calling.

They started talking about "Hard Times," eagerly exchanging ideas as if they were remaking the song for the first time. Less debate than weighing the merits of the little musical machinery: clarification of the narrative, more evocative language.

"We like the playoffs," Rawlings said, waving his hands like he was putting the pieces of a puzzle together. "There was a time when I thought of a song from Hard Times and then I said 'Hard times won't rule my mind' and then 'Enough' and then 'Okay, I get it now and I know how to express evidence '. '"

"Yes, it almost relates to that moment of transformation or redemption, or a switch is flipped," Welch interjected emotionally. "Someone told me before these songs: There must be a reason for this. It's about peak moments. precise moments. She gave an example: " 'LikeAnother dollar and I'm going home. It helps us focus on this transformative moment.”

Redemption and optimism are subjects I find difficult to address, especially now considering not only the masses of people dying, but the way lives have become mere numbers on an ever-increasing chart. While the land itself may not be worth redeeming. While, of course, with all the reason for optimism I've found, a new, darker, more cynical corner is being dug up.

But now I'm thinking about the arcs of redemption that run through the duo's songs. How nice they are with their characters, their landscapes. Even if some think they don't deserve it. Throughout their career, even in some of "The Lost Songs" and the songs they picked up on "All the Good Times," there's a certain relief at the end of the dark. In their rendition of Dylan's "Abandoned Love," the pair extract all of the fear from the song's first seven verses before patiently and tenderly enunciating the final verse: where Dylan begs to feel his wife's love one more time. . before leaving the relationship. It's hopeful: the kind of song ending where you know the answer was yes just from the way it's sung. It is in the rigorous telling of truth that the two excel: none can be saved without clearly articulating why redemption is necessary. And that's the part that some other singers can miss. But Welch and Rawlings, as writers, have in their hands the chaos of a life worth living, despite its chaos.

"There's good in trouble," Welch said, half drowned out by the screams of the cicadas. "The specific type of problem I seem to connect with is the other type where the endpoint isn't. And I'm aware that I don't see salvation as an external force in a lot of these songs. It's like self redemption. I think that in many of them, man can only persevere and win. And sometimes it's fun, but sometimes I think it's just the person not giving up." At this point, Welch grinned a little, eager to talk about redemption in a time that sometimes feels irretrievable. "I am Growing up listening to folk music where I sang from a man's point of view, often a black man or woman, all these different people, and I connected with all of them. And that's what we're trying to do. I'm trying to do a song write that everyone can sing along to, not because it's so boring, but because it's so deeply rooted in the human experience that everyone is dealing with. Love, loss, death."

Welch then surprised me with an unexpected statement: "I'm an optimist." Instinctively and perhaps too clinically, I asked him how he was doing right now. He paused, night was falling and the clouds, once heavy with rain, were now thin enough to see a few stars.

"Okay," he said to me. "I don't think anyone will stop everyone's spirit."