TWO TOGETHER: Welch & Rawlings

Norman Warwick learns how

TWO TOGETHER: Welch & Rawlings

gleaned a body of work from catastrophe

By now, you’ve probably heard the story about how Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’s studio, Woodland, in Nashville was ravaged by a tornado in 2020. After the twister touched down at 1 AM, gas mains broke, debris covered the roads, fires kicked up and power lines fell. Four years have passed since that night, but don’t bother asking the singer-songwriter duo how long it took them to rebuild the studio, because they’re still working on it. Things like that take time, especially when it comes to repairing a music-making place. You have to be attentive, precious and patient, and you have to wager with the trauma you’re now carrying in the wake of its breakage. “It was so painful after the tornado. It was awful seeing the room with the ceiling collapsed. Oh, it was such a mess,” Welch tells me over the phone. “And then it was even worse when they got into demolition and they literally tore it down. I had to stop going over there, it was too much.”

Contractors never touched the linoleum floors, but all of the sawtooth, triangulated walls were torn down to cinderblock. There was no ceiling, and all of the electrical wires were hanging everywhere. At that point, Rawlings took over and oversaw the rebuild’s completion. “I was here every day for 14+ hours for years,” he tells me in-between breaks at the studio. “So much of that time was not getting into musical things. It was, literally, building and re-building walls, putting up all of the acoustic tiles.” When Welch and Rawlings harmonize together on their new album, the lines “I used to dream of something unseen, it was something that I thought I wanted so bad, but now I only want what we had” feel retrospective in a bittersweet way, as if there was a real sense of gratitude lingering in the air now that they were both able to be artists again.

But it wasn’t a matter of “getting back into the studio” after the disaster. “It was like being able to use it for what it was made for,” Rawlings says, “as opposed to having your attention turned to things it wasn’t made for. I think that gives you a real appreciation of the power that the creative act has over the mind and how it is the most fun thing to do.” Welch believes that the tornado, COVID-19 pandemic and “subsequent cultural collapse” provided a potent cocktail of musical dynamo. Reconstructing the studio laid to rest “the last vestiges of any sort of younger hesitancy to change the studio.” “We had such respect for Woodland when it became ours that there were a few things that didn’t really suit us that we just didn’t change, because who were we to go changing this hallowed hall?” she says. “But that was gone and then had to be rebuilt, so we rebuilt it to our needs.”

Welch (left)  and Rawlings did some recordings in the D room before the A room was done, and they would write, rehearse and arrange every night after Rawlings finished his daily repairs—only for him to go back and continue patching things up until nearly two in the morning. They were able to save their equipment, too, and Rawlings designed a system where he could run an analog tape machine from the control room so that he and Welch were able to record without anyone else being in the building. “It was amazing to stand in that big, open room and hear it and have thought about the sound of it, thought about the treatments and what kind of sound we were going to get out of it and make decisions about what the new surfaces would be,” Rawlings continues. “As soon as you feel that, you’re like, ‘I want to hear some strings in here. I want to do some stuff with a rhythm section. I want to see what that sounds like with just the two of us in the middle of the room, just completely alone.’ They were all things that felt like they needed to be explored.” It’s why, when Welch and Rawlings thought of Woodland as the title, it was clear how much the overlay affected every element. There was never going to be a more-appropriate name for this record. And that colored the work that has come to define that might remind Welch’s admirers of a record called Soul Journey, which she and Rawlings made in 2003.

This new LP is a callback to that because of its “band in a room” energy, as it was made without booths or headphones—just a bunch of musicians listening to each other and tailing the muse. The drum kit and bass guitars are still in the same corner they were 21 years ago, and you can feel the connectivity become kinetic on songs like “The Day the Mississippi Died” and “Turf the Gambler.” “It’s a challenge for Dave and I to expand what we do and include a rhythm section,” Welch says, “because everything we do—when we’re writing the songs, when we’re arranging them, every night when we’re playing them—is tailored for the two of us, from stem to stern. We’re thinking, ‘Okay, how do we make it fly with just the two of us?’ And that really is a constant yardstick for us.”

But when you toss a song like “Empty Trainload of Sky” or “Look at Miss Ohio” into the mix, the material demands a grand sound placed around the central kernel of Welch and Rawlings’s duets. “Any chance we get to challenge ourselves, we’ll take it,” Welch continues. “I’m not sure people realize how much of a straight jacket a duet is. It has so many more confines than the solo performer and, yet, it doesn’t have all of the freedoms of a full band.” Woodland is the first compilation of new material that Welch and Rawlings have released in 13 years, but neither of them have stopped working since The Harrow & the Harvest came out in 2011. “We don’t take any vacations,” Welch laughs. “We’re always writing. It just depends on if we are moved to put it out. One of the reasons I think that people are still checking out what we’re up to, at this point, is I think they know that we haven’t given up. That starts to get rarer and rarer as one moves through the decades. And I don’t really know why that is. Maybe people just get tired. It is tiring. Maybe people think they’re just repeating themselves.”

Welch pauses for a moment and collects her thoughts. “You know, to my detriment,” she continues, “I’ve never honed in on successful songs of ours and thought, ‘Oh, I should do that again!’ I probably should have, but my mind doesn’t work that way. I just wait for the world to really move me and that usually causes an artistic reaction.”

The world certainly moved her and Rawlings on Woodland, the second consecutive album attributed to both singer-songwriters, after the Grammy-winning All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone) in 2020, though the duo have been making recorded music together since Welch uttered the “I am an orphan on God’s highway” line at the dawn of Revival 28 years ago. But even before then, Welch and Rawlings were just a couple of Berklee kids playing together in the only country band on campus. But there was never a plan; the duo just kept wanting to make more music together. That’s how they came up with Hell Among the Yearlings and Time (The Revelator). “I just have this profound belief that the best music I can make is with David,” Welch says. “And I’m pretty sure he has the same belief. If you’re a driven artist, you want to make the best art you can, so we keep plugging along.”

Welch admits that she isn’t the kind of person who puts much forethought into planning ahead. Rather, she puts obsessive thought into the moment at hand and whatever obstacle is right in front of her. When writing with Rawlings, it helps that she and him are always on the same page. “Since college, we just found that our creative desires aligned,” she says. “And our taste is almost more than what you like. It’s what you dislike that is really important in a collaborator. Dave and I both hate the same shit. We don’t even need to talk about it. I’ll see him roll his eyes and I know. And likewise. The thing that’ll really send me, it’s the same thing for him. We’ll be at a Dylan concert and Bob will do something, and both Dave and I will be like, ‘Oh,’ at the exact same moment.”

Just as Welch has remained keen on dusting the fauna of her own storytelling with gracious, novelistic verses and elemental, God-gifted refrains (she was the first musician to win the Thomas Wolfe Prize for Literature, after all), I am equally fascinated by Rawlings’ guitar-playing on Woodland. It’s a style that’s always been methodical, but if you watch a video of him and Welch performing “Caleb Meyer” in 2004, it’s like he’s attacking the guitar without sacrificing the splendor of the melody. The songs he and Welch wrote for Woodland are so often chronicling a moment and, so often, his chords accentuate these stories—like daylight becoming a revelation on “Empty Trainload of Sky,” or easy-living thinning like blood on “North Country”—as notes stretch and fold back into themselves. If Welch’s words are small acts of survival, then Rawlings’s pickings are the much-needed noise carrying them toward safety. “There is a marriage of melody and chords and feel from the inception of the song,” Rawlings explains. “You keep looking for that fit with the words, where you feel that the music is amplifying it and pushing it in a direction that you really understand and that you love.”

Welch and Rawlings (right)  worked on some of the Woodland songs for a long time, and “Lawman” alone is almost two decades old and looked completely different 15 years ago. “It’s fun to return to things like that later, and all that remains—all you can remember—are the parts, the best parts, and everything else that you worked on falls away,” Rawlings notes. He and Welch try to accelerate that process now by letting themselves zero in on what works and what doesn’t. “You get it done and you’re like, ‘Okay, this is it!’” he continues. “And then, two nights later, you’re like, ‘Gosh, it’s not right yet.’ You like it for 24 hours and then you get another way and you might like it for 48 hours. And then you get another way and you like it for six hours. Then, all of a sudden, you realize you can see what the best of it is and you make some changes and it just locks into a place.”.

Rawlings doesn’t believe that the hunger and romanticism he and Welch feel about the unknown in their songwriting will ever dissipate, because it’s “the most challenging and most interesting thing that you can do.” When they wrote the almost-15-minute “I Dream a Highway” together more than 20 years ago, it came from Rawlings playing a then-unnoteworthy melody and Welch turning it into the “Oh, I dream a highway back to you, love” refrain. And then, a few years later, Welch was playing in a different room while she and Rawlings were plucking away at some other song together. That’s when she started singing something new that caught Rawlings’s ear.

“99 songs out of 100 don’t go anywhere,” he says, “but I was like, ‘What was the catchy thing I heard you saying?’ And she was like, ‘What?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know, you’re saying something and it sounded really, really good.’ And she was like, ‘Oh, this?’” What Welch was saying was “Oh me, oh my oh, look at Miss Ohio.” “It’s interesting how, a lot of times, the things that end up being really enduring almost seem too obvious, or something,” Rawlings adds, snickering into a gut-busting laugh. It’s contagious, hearing exactly how he and Welch operate through this language of their own.

And while a lyric like “All my world is changing, I don’t know where I’m going” may sound uncertain when it welcomes “What We Had” into focus, Welch and Rawlings would never let us off that easily. Instead, it’s a very Hemingway-like perspective on a conversation, as if the duo are reflecting on their own shared and separate humanity mid-song—two 50-something-year-olds debating over whether it’s a train or a sky lingering ahead of them. Does it make for a full cup or an empty cup? “It depends on how you’re feeling, or the answer is really both,” Welch says.

Welch moves through the world as an artist, and it’s how she comes to better understand herself and the world and life and the people around and beyond her. “And I don’t always say the things I’m thinking,” she continues. “In fact, quite often, I don’t, which is one of the reasons I have to be a writer—because these things have to come out somehow. Of course, Dave and I do converse about the catastrophe around us and persevering and all of it and keeping creating and what we still want to do. Some of these almost conflicting feelings, they’re very present in this album. There is weariness. There is perseverance. There is joy and sadness.”

What feels memorable about Woodland is that Welch and Rawlings (left)  sing through intuition, not catharsis. These tales don’t all have the endings we want them to; “When will we become ourselves?” is the line that ends “Hashtag” and it’s a rhetorical question, because there is something about resolution that feels faraway on an album like this, and sometimes that is because life itself is often not resolute. And yet, to exist is to demand an ending—to demand closure—but Woodland closes the door without ever turning the lock. “Songs don’t just end,” Welch says. “They do have to have endings, but they don’t have to have a bow on top. But they do have to end. As far as we’re concerned, as songwriters, they have to have an ending. We often say, ‘So what?’ When you get to the third verse, so what? I’ve put in this time with you, as a listener, and what? What do I get before the period comes? And, sometimes, with us, I’m starting to suspect that the ‘so what’ is just ‘so you keep going.’”

From Revival on, there has been a very non-overt but oft-present stoicism in Welch and Rawlings’s lyrics. As dark as some of those moments are—death of a child, damnation, addiction, heartbreak—none of the duo’s characters give up. They, as Welch would argue, just keep going. “Now, sitting here at this juncture, I’m able to say, ‘Oh, that is kind of personally true,’” she continues. “If you asked me, ‘Is that song about you?,’ I’d probably say, ‘Well, it’s not not about me, right?’—because, here we are. We haven’t given up. Yeah, the characters might have different names, but the stories are familiar.”

Too, Welch says that the “howdy howdy” phrase that encompasses the final song on Woodland is derived from a gospel, that’s it’s a “spiritual vernacular.” She and Rawlings are no stranger to traditional music, whether it’s playing arrangements straight out of hymn books or tinkering with old Carter Family material. Even a song like “Here Stands a Woman” alludes to Woody Guthrie’s “Danville Girl.” It’s the kind of stuff that transports Welch and Rawlings to their earliest days together, when they were both fascinated by music made by “brother teams” like the Delmore and Monroe Brothers or the Blue Sky Boys.

“They tended to play as duets with one lead-ish instruments, like a tenor guitar and a rhythm guitar, and sing in close harmony and arrange songs that way,” Rawlings notes. “A lot of it was economic, because you’d find a local radio station and you’d play on it in the morning before the farmers went out to work. You’re playing on the air at 4:30 or 5 AM. You’d do a little set and then you’d maybe do another one in the afternoon. You’d do personal appearances within the range of that station and hope people would come to your shows. It was a pretty hard-scrabble way for musicians to make a living, but that’s what a lot of world musicians did.”

Those “brother teams” believed that making a complete sound with just two instruments and two voices while performing gospel songs or up-tempo, sentimental numbers or love ballads was a necessity. It was often a matter of covering a broad range of sounds in a very minimalist setting, happening throughout the Depression and long after World War II as bluegrass and string bands were becoming larger and far more present. “We looked at some of that music, which is really beautiful, and thought we would sing it ourselves,” Rawlings says. He and Welch once went to a pickin’ party in North Carolina and, in a song-circle, started playing a few Blue Sky Boys compositions.

“Some of the folks came up and said, ‘Oh, my God, it’s been so long since I heard anyone sing my uncle’s songs. You do such a beautiful job,’ and we thought, ‘Wow, these are people who are related to the folks who made these records that we love and they approve of what we’re doing and they think we do it well.’ It felt like, to me, a medium that hadn’t really been taken as far as it could go, because it was just a handful of years before music changed. We were inspired by that, to try to create as much as we could and complete pictures with just two instruments.” On Woodland, Welch and Rawlings wanted to conjure that same idea, to create a complete picture with only themselves. Songs like “Lawman” and “The Bells and the Birds”—songs done live with two instruments—especially subscribe to the desire to, musically, have as much in them, even in a microcosmic way, than the songs that are more arranged, like “What We Had” and “Hashtag.”

Woodland, because of its dense, lush instrumentation and its inclusion of electric bass, pedal steel and drums, feels like Welch and Rawlings have “finally shaken the last dusty cobwebs” off of the question “Are these things happening in the present day?” “To me,” Welch says, “they were never ‘back in time,’ because they were just human stories. I don’t really think the human condition has changed that much. The really big struggles, they’re timeless.” She pauses for a moment. “Or, maybe what we were writing about was more obvious, because we tipped people off by letting them know that ‘Hashtag’ was about Guy Clark.”

The initial concept for “Hashtag” came to Welch when she saw “#GuyClark” on her phone and knew what it meant. “It used to be that, sometimes, you would hear a musician you loved on the radio and think, ‘Why are they playing this person on the radio?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, God,’ you know?” Rawlings says. “There was something about that moment and the moment of, later, going to his memorial with all these wonderful Nashville musicians and friends. He was such an indelible part of our early lives as artists and of this town and of the musical community. That song felt like it was something worth reflecting on—this community and how important these artists can be to other artists and how much we learned from them.”

While Welch and Rawlings spent a lot of time with Clark over the years and had great conversations they can still look back on, “Hashtag” is a particularly somber take on how fleeting it is to know another person. “You’re working musicians and you take time together when you get it,” Rawlings says. “As we were on the road more and got more successful, I would see Guy at festivals here and there, and we would always make time for each other, but you don’t get to spend as much time as you want with someone. And you listen to their records just like you listen to anybody’s records who you love but, with Guy, you just have a special feeling for the people who showed you the ropes and who taught you about songwriting and artistic integrity.” “Hashtag” also wound up being the first song that Welch and Rawlings added strings to, as they overdubbed their original performance late one night at Woodland after finding an old demo tape that “hit us really hard.” “It felt like the ghosts were there,” Rawlings concludes.

There is loss on a record like Woodland, and there’s confusion and haggling over the price of getting older and how we are remembered. But there is warmth embedded in the ache, and even when a river dries up or an apocalypse is nigh, moments pass, Ketch Secor’s fiddle cracks open the bailiwick and a sweetness echoes. These 10 songs were made in a place that was, quite literally, brought back to life, and, in turn, these 10 songs can teach a person a whole lot about the idea of “renewal.” It certainly has transformed Welch’s outlook: “I think I’ve learned that tremendous pain and destruction, if you can keep your head, makes way for new growth, as long as you continue to really participate and try,” she says. “If you give up, then you’re just sitting there in the rubble, in the ashes. I don’t really know anything about Eastern philosophy, but I’ve heard little whispers of things, that there is no such thing, really, as a ‘bad occurrence.’ There’s just an occurrence. I think I understand that a little bit now. Of course, things are going to be painful. It doesn’t really make them bad.”

There is loss on a record like Woodland, and there’s confusion and haggling over the price of getting older and how we are remembered. But there is warmth embedded in the ache, and even when a river dries up or an apocalypse is nigh, moments pass, Ketch Secor’s fiddle cracks open the bailiwick and a sweetness echoes. These 10 songs were made in a place that was, quite literally, brought back to life, and, in turn, these 10 songs can teach a person a whole lot about the idea of “renewal.” It certainly has transformed Welch’s outlook: “I think I’ve learned that tremendous pain and destruction, if you can keep your head, makes way for new growth, as long as you continue to really participate and try,” she says. “If you give up, then you’re just sitting there in the rubble, in the ashes. I don’t really know anything about Eastern philosophy, but I’ve heard little whispers of things, that there is no such thing, really, as a ‘bad occurrence.’ There’s just an occurrence. I think I understand that a little bit now. Of course, things are going to be painful. It doesn’t really make them bad.”

At the dusk of Woodland, this chapter of the Welch-Rawlings canon ends in harmony, as they sing “You and me, always walk that lonesome valley” in a delivery as gentle as the two-part guitar chords breathing in and out beneath their voices. Almost 30 years ago, it was just the two of them and a half-dozen unlearned lessons. Now, Welch has “been all around this world” and, across the 10 songs on Woodland, is comfortable with there being no arrivals or exits. The dreams she and Rawlings sing of just are, existing like breathtaking, momentous bursts of light gleaned from catastrophe—perspectives falling through the niches in our hearts. And that is where they retreated after that tornado ripped through Nashville and levelled parts of their beloved studio four years ago. They met each other at their most solid foundation, guiding themselves through catastrophe by returning to the American folk music canon, the most consequential atoms woven into the fabric of what they do and who they are. “We sat in our living room and played folk music every night,” Welch says. “We sang the songs that we first sang together.”

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