Calamity grounded these US folk icons, but now they’re heading our way

It’s nearing sundown in Nashville and Gillian Welch is almost in the zone. “Some of my best work,” she says, “happens when I’m alone in the house, on the sofa, and the light is starting to fall, and I’m starting to think, ‘Oh, what have I got to show for my day?’ And then some switch in my brain flips and I start writing.

“Dave, he works very differently,” she says of her partner David Rawlings, presently toiling through another 15-hour day at their nearby studio, Woodland. “The majority of his best work may be done while he’s brushing his teeth. I’m not even kidding,” she insists with a laugh.

The home-bound arrangement has evidently worked a treat these last few years, as the first couple of modern American folk weathered their longest spell off the road in three decades. Their new album, Woodland, which will see them back in Melbourne and Sydney in January, was born of the double whammy of COVID isolation and a 2020 tornado that half-destroyed the titular studio building, leading to years of reconstruction and stocktaking.

“Since the tornado, even though we haven’t really been out in the world, we’ve sort of been in high gear,” Welch says. “We’ve just been writing and recording and releasing bootlegs from the archive, and Dave’s been designing equipment and new circuitry and rebuilding the studio ...

“For quite a while we thought this record might be a double, so we already have the lion’s share of another record just about ready to go. Maybe it’s the simple fact of destruction and the sense of mortality, I don’t know. But ... we’ve just been quiet dynamos over here.”

The “we” is worth dwelling on. Despite Welch’s marquee name among the leading lights of the Americana genre, Rawlings’ presence as co-writer, singer and multi-instrumentalist has been a given since her debut of 1996, Revival.

He was there behind her, and Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris, as the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack smuggled old-time American folk into the global mainstream in 2000. She also writes and performs with his band, Dave Rawlings Machine. But it’s only since their pandemic album of folk covers, All the Good Times, that they’ve shared equal billing.

“After the tornado and then the pandemic hit and huge portions of the world were in lockdown for months ... our world, which is normally pretty small, got really small,” says Welch. “All David and I did was sit in the living room and play old folk songs. That’s how we attempted to hang on to our sanity.

“It was horrible. You know, with our studio in a shambles and our neighbourhood looking like a bombed-out war zone with no power … it really was like we were living in this post-apocalyptic disaster nightmare.

“For my part, there was no way to think about dissecting these last couple of years and say, ‘Well, whose album is this next one?’ … All of that felt like such a contrivance. We just wanted to put out a record that was the most truthful about this chunk of time.”

When Rawlings calls from Woodland – new roof, main room gutted and rebuilt “but many parts still look like a tornado hit it” – he’s working on the pressing plates for the album’s vinyl release. And he’s still unpacking exactly how its 10 songs about trains and birds, gamblers, lawmen and troubadours, looking back and growing old fell together so seamlessly.

“To me, it seems all steeped in a certain kind of loss,” he says. “And there is a kind of duality in some of the lyrics, like The Bells and the Birds: ‘Some hear a song and some hear a warning’, or in Empty Trainload of Sky” – in which a singular, haunting image sends our narrator into a spiral of confusion about whether she’s witnessing a sign from “the Devil or the Lord”.

“It’s like, you have this experience, you take in this sensory event, and then you have to ask yourself what it means to you, emotionally and spiritually. I don’t think we realised how much the routine of just working on this project; not travelling and not doing anything but just trying, day after day, to get back on our feet, how much that was in our psyches, and in the way the music sounds.”

Hashtag is another one that speaks to the pair’s closely entwined experience. Years ago, during one of her sundown flashes of inspiration, Welch sang into her iPhone about a life-affirming encounter with a fellow singer. Much later, Rawlings sang it back with the killer chorus that eluded her, leading into a second half about the friend’s recent passing.

“That really is about loss, and about how important mentors and musicians and community are to each other,” he says. “When you are playing music, it really matters that other people who do it hear you and appreciate it; really understand the physicality of what it is to commit yourself to it, to write the best songs you can, do the best performance you can out on the road somewhere where maybe you don’t feel as appreciated as you could every night.

“It’s what keeps a lot of people going: that feeling that you’re not alone,” he says, incidentally nailing the most fundamental gift that a song can give. In their almost freakish blend of matched vocal qualities and tightly interwoven acoustic guitar styles, that empathetic quality has always felt baked into Welch and Rawlings’ work.

“A lot of people talk about my guitar playing,” Rawlings says, “but what’s really happening is there’s two people playing guitar and it makes that sound. I think I’m the second-best guitar player in our band, because the nuance with which Gill plays rhythm guitar; the way that she separates the bass and the way she leaves space is actually a rarer thing than what I do.

“When Gill and I play together, what we’re looking for is we want the guitars to make a full, complete landscape. I mean, if it just sounds like two guitars, I’m not interested. We just keep trying things until it locks into this picture. Maybe that’s synesthesia, I don’t know, but I can see it, and I know when we have it.”

Welch talks in similar terms about their voices: an unusual blend of female alto and male tenor that winds up almost identical in range and timbre when layered together, as first discovered when they arrived in Nashville from Boston’s Berklee College of Music in the US summer of ’92.

“There was this night, we were the only two people at the house, and we sat in his kitchen and we sang Long Black Veil, and we stopped afterwards and we both commented that we thought we had a nice, natural blend,” Welch says with amusing understatement. They’ve been on the road together, on their own time and driving their own cars, ever since.

“Dave and I are very stubborn and very independent and free-willed, and early on we figured out we just can’t abide living our lives with someone saying, ‘Lobby call at 9.15’.
“So yeah, we do our own driving. And we never have conversations about what time we’re leaving. I mean, granted, once in a while you’ll get a blizzard … but we don’t miss shows. And we’re never late.”

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings play Sydney Opera House on January 24 and 25; and Hamer Hall, Melbourne, on January 28, 29, 30 and 31. Tickets on sale now; lovepolice.com.au.