Gillian Welch

Oh baby!

They released Poor David's Almanack in 2017 under Rawlings' name but half of which was joint Rawlings/Welch co-writes. It's a great album, don't sleep on it. xp

Gillian and David are adding new shows to their extensive 2024 US Tour including Concord NH, Baltimore, Tysons VA, Philadelphia and a third evening in Saxapahaw, NC. These new shows will go on sale this Friday, August 16 at 10am local time.

FAN CLUB PRESALE INFO

We are offering a special fan club presale for these shows! Use the code HASHTAG to purchase tickets on Tuesday, August 13 at 10am local time.

All previously announced tour dates are on sale now with the exception of Boone, NC, which will be coming soon. Find all ticket links and updated info on the Gillian Welch & David Rawlings Tour Page.

At first they were just listing a Thursday "venue" pre-sale , but then the above one popped up.

My wife got tickets in the afternoon when I noticed that (at which point the center section tickets were gone)

More already sold out than I'd noticed: Evanston, St. Louis, Birmingham, Boston, Portland ME---those last two in New England December---that's loyalty!

David sings on the new song? He sounds good enough but I hope he doesn’t sing lead much more than that.

hmmm no west coast dates yet, sulk

just gorgeous

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVoO0RwoKho

fantastic — so lush! kind of like a comes a time-era Neil song.

First impression: It definitely has a different vibe from past albums. Still fully her, but just a little less traditional.

That track is great, thanks!

Ann Powers at NPR has an August 24 NPR Music email titled "Why I was wrong about Gillian Welch and David Rawlings"

Hello fellow students of the exquisite gesture,

This week offers me a chance to return to an apology I’ve been making off and on for decades. I’m offering it again, this time in full, to my neighbors Gillan Welch and David Rawlings – beloved central figures in the Nashville music scene. The singer-songwriters have a new album out, named Woodland after the studio they co-own down the road from me in the neighborhood we call “East.” Just the second album the longtime partners have released as an official duo (the first, all covers, won a Grammy in 2021), Woodland is a culmination of their work together, which has varied from Welch’s spare early albums, including the 2001 classic Time (the Revelator), to Rawlings’s more band-oriented efforts. Woodland gently draws connections between Welch’s inherent melancholy and Rawlings’ wry humor, as the pair trades lead vocals and lyrical insights like a longtime couple pulling each others’ faded t-shirts out of a shared drawer.

I am absorbed and transported by Woodland, but I'm not here to tell you why this particular Welch-Rawlings release is a winner. (We’ll be running a review soon from one of my favorite music scribes, Jenn Pelly.) I’m here to admit that all those years ago when Welch released her debut album, Revival, I wrote a lukewarm-at-best review that showed my complete misapprehension about what they were up to then and continue to pursue now. My review ran in Rolling Stone, so it had a lot of reach, and to this day other writers cite it as a black mark on my own record as a critic and an undue burden on the duo as they were just embarking on what would be a remarkably storied career. I don’t know about the latter – few agreed with me, then or since. But I’ve thought a lot about why I called Revival a “handcrafted simulacrum” of roots music instead of recognizing it as the real thing it was.

I’ve realized that my problem was a contrarian attitude about authenticity. I am highly suspicious of that term, by the way, even though I will never stop pondering its complexities. Music is often praised as authentic when it plays by certain rules, replicating past sounds and styles, or when it feels direct, unfussy, more serious than phantasmagorical. In their vintage clothes, deploying harmonies they’d learned listening to old Carter Family albums, Welch and Rawlings epitomized that definition whether they wanted to do so or not. That’s why I struggled with the early music – I resented anyone who imposed narrowly defined hierarchies on music, including the fans quickly gathering at Welch and Rawlings’s feet.

When I first encountered the pair, at a South by Southwest showcase the same year Revival came out, the fog of authenticity enshrouded them. Performing at the Driskill Hotel, Welch and Rawlings leaned in close to produce their remarkable vocal blend and acoustic guitar interplay. I had a good seat. I could hear them fine, and was perfectly aware that theirs was a rare art full of grace and mystery. Yet, I couldn’t take that in because I was so put off by what surrounded the duo that day: a stern reverence hemming in the audience, who sat in silence as if that hotel conference room were a church, and not the holy roller kind.

In 1996 I was a holy roller, or maybe a profane one. I wanted music to raucously transport me, to be excessive and fun. Or I wanted it to be weird and smudgy, the way I saw my own life in the then-not-gentrified slippery slope of South Brooklyn. At that same South by Southwest, I’d danced ecstatically to the plastic pop sounds of Imperial Teen, the Bay Area band who had songs with titles like “Copafeelia,” sparkle bombs of sonic playfulness and queer desire. Through no real fault of their own, Welch and Rawlings came to represent the opposite. It was all too dignified – too damned authentic – for me.

It was only later that I realized that authenticity could be defined differently. I learned this partly through experience and partly from two novelists named Richard – Ford and Russo. I’ve written about this before, when reviewing another revivalist who isn’t really that, Tyler Childers; at that time I quoted Ford’s observation that the authentic gesture is the one that isn’t “a learned response.” This thought inverted the usual music-snob hierarchies, privileging spontaneity over convention. Later, I discovered a review by Russo that discussed authenticity in fiction as stemming from an author’s ability to let go of her characters and let them “arrive where they land.” Though external cues may be useful in establishing the ground upon which authenticity can be comprehended – a shared language of rules and customs – it actually emerges from within, an aspect of an individual’s personality and experience or of people’s unscripted interactions with each other. Both Ford and Russo define the authentic gesture as defined by what informs it, but in an unexpected, personal way.

In fiction, that means letting a character’s arc develop gently instead of bending it to fit a plot or a setting. How does this apply to songwriting? I think it requires absorbing influences without worrying too much about mastering them – recognizing, in fact, that what makes them interesting is the mistakes and odd turns that one’s hallowed predecessors made, the obsessions they couldn’t help but pursue, the ingrained strangeness of every individual.

I also see now that in popular music, authenticity is a tool or a vehicle, not a product. This was evident this week at the Democratic National Convention, when Jason Isbell – also an Americana music standard-bearer who’s largely uninterested in such accolades – sang a song for his working-class father, “Something More Than Free,” one night before the Atlanta rapper Lil Jon turned his raunchy classic “Get Low” into a wholesome anthem during the states and territories’ roll call. Both performances were strategic, sending a message about what the idea of “the people” means. Each radiated authenticity because it was thought out, connected to the larger mood of the convention, and carefully executed.

Authenticity, in other words, is something determined by different contexts and inhabited differently by whomever generates it. What I didn’t see about Welch and Rawlings in 1996 was that they were already figuring this out. They were learning back then, not long out of music school, only recently rooted in the city where much of their favorite music had been made. It wouldn’t take long for them to develop intrinsic authenticity, because they already had all the ingredients: Welch’s voice, which seems to emanate from birdsong and women’s whispers and other unannotated musical sources; Rawlings’ sense of time, somehow both attentive and utterly relaxed; as writers, the ability to renew the tired language of the folk revival with the slightest adjustment of perspective. Immersed in history and custom, they were finding a way to inhabit it as people moving toward a new century. They’re still finding that way. “When do we become ourselves?” they sing on “Hashtag,” a song dedicated to their late mentor, the subtle individualist Guy Clark. Years ago, I didn’t realize this question would be a lifelong one for them; now I do.

called Revival a “handcrafted simulacrum” of roots music instead of recognizing it as the real thing it was.

When I first encountered the pair, at a South by Southwest showcase the same year Revival came out, the fog of authenticity enshrouded them

cringe

Jason Isbell – also an Americana music standard-bearer who’s largely uninterested in such accolades

lol what

i don't know why any critic ever gets into assessing true authenticity. it's a pointless exercise, imo.

if you make hillbilly music, i really don't care that much if you're an actual hillbilly or if you just do a good job of sounding like an actual hillbilly ... both are fine with me. i want to know what you think about the music a lot more than what you think about the person making the music.

do i love carpetbaggers? not particularly. but i can give credit to a carpetbagger who's a good performer and has great songs. if you're inauthentic enough, i can sniff you out without someone else telling me to sniff you out.

There’s also the question of who gets to decide what’s “authentic.” That’s a slippery slope. Anyway, the new album is very beautiful.

Anytime I see discussion of “authenticity” as regards music my blood pressure gets up and I want to die.

Loving the new record so far. Very interesting reworking of “Lawman,” which has been around for close to 20 years in a different version. “What We Had” is killing me.

How many songs does Rawlings sing on the new one?

I was just listening to All The Good Times and his takes on Dylan were fine but it pains me to hear him singing when it could be Gillian.

He sings harmony throughout. On a few songs, he takes lead for certain verses, but not extensively. It’s still mostly Gillian singing lead.

But that's not too bad a term its own self: Welch reminds me of Eudora Welty at her peak, having absorbed folk tales, fairy tales even, as well as older forms of pop and art, crafting an aperture and mirror for observers, who don't have to try to wish their way into the past, although that's one option for some, just isn't necessary for others to find something relatable, to care about,something and someone still living in these glimpses, these situations (which is prob along the lines of what Powers went on to say, but I haven't read all of it).
― dow, Sunday, August 25, 2024 6:36 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

But you can say the same thing about Bascom Lamar Lumsford (himself a folklorist and a lawyer by profession) who was memorialized on the Anthology of American Folk Music. In fact, many of the performers we think of as original "roots" music were themselves collectors and gatherers of folk songs, they were just the ones who happened to be around when those first scratchy records were made. And other performers had their acts shaped by record companies, producers, and even folklorists who encouraged them to emphasize certain parts of their persona or music to portray authenticity. I recently read that Doc Watson actually loved playing electric guitar, but was encouraged to play only acoustic to maintain his rootsy image. It's easy to forget sometimes that he was born more than two decades into the twentieth century and came of age when recorded music was already fairly widespread.

Willie Dixon who Led Zeppelin stole from was himself a notorious song thief

I don't think the concept of "authenticity" is COMPLETELY useless, because clearly people mean something by it and other people recognize something by it. But maybe we're really talking about how convincingly someone sells us something or how convincingly they are "in character" in relation to the music. Like I think there are things most of us find cringey (e.g. obviously pampered suburban kid rapping unconvincingly about their gangsta life, dentist looking too comfortable singing the blues, etc.) so maybe "authenticity" is just the opposite of that. It doesn't necessarily have to mean you literally have to grow up in a tin shack on a dirt road to sing old Appalachian music, or even that a dentist can't sing good blues. But OTOH some audiences definitely buy into these authenticity tropes more if they believe that the artist grew up in a tin shack on a dirt road.

I guess to me, Gillian Welch never sounded like she was trying to convince me she grew up in a tin shack, she just did her own spin on music that may have some of its roots in that. If you think about the whole O Brother phenomenon - the film itself, T Bone Burnett's production, etc., all of it is fairly self-aware and not trying to convince you it's authentic old-timey stuff.

In fact, Welch herself commented smartly (maybe in response to powers and other critics) on the whole idea of authenticity in The Revelator.

"the queen of fakes and imitators"

About a year ago, my father-in-law mentioned doing chores for "The Traipsin Woman" in his town, who he recalled had something to do with a music festival. Leading us down the rabbit hole of

https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2019/08/jean-thomas-kentuckys-traipsin-woman.html

Sounds like she was the salt of the earth, but she also went to Hunter College. Lunceford's "Mole in the Ground" was recorded in Ashland, maybe because of her connections?

20th century concern about authenticity in music is so weird now. Powers' certainly captures what a muddled concept it is -- I can't quite extract exactly how her feelings have changed, but it reads as a similar history of emotions I've felt. It's like "authenticity" is orthogonal to "pornography", like you know it when you see it, but upon the slightest reflection you don't.

I love that the Welch album gets "ditch that class in college" out of the way within two verses.

The problem with authenticity is solely with the listener. It often dupes people into liking really boring shit

i prefer fakely boring shit

It’s just good ol’ gatekeeping as usual

Gil & Dave’s turn to modernity in the songwriting is hardly new, tho. They’ve been at it for at least 25 years — by Revelator, they weren’t writing about stills in the holler much, more about going to see a junked-out punk band or lamenting Napster. I thought “Harrow” was a step backwards in that regard, tho admittedly I haven’t spent much time with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPBR8sB1W30

I didn't spend much time with Harrow until relatively recently. Really like Scarlet Town and Hard Times.

Forget about Doreen, thanks!
If somebody in a Welch song seems like she might being trying to wrap her brane around her life in, say, 1924, I often relate to that in whut is this 2024 (wow). And speaking of roots, life goes on and we tend to take of it with us, so why not somebodies---her and Dave, making those harmonies----sounding like the mountains never left them behind---it happens; think of Los Angelena Iris DeMent, hell think of mostly Cali-raised Haggard and Kristofferson----thinking tonight, like on the old camp ground, of how Elvis shook it like a stripper, baby
Bill Monroe put his fusion music (bluegrass) together, put the later touches on it, while following his brothers to jobs in places like East Chicago and Flint.
Maybe 20 years later, Bobby Zimmerman, as he's mentioned to interviewers, heard Monroe's "Drifting To Far From The Shore" while stuck up there in Hibbing, implying that it was an influence on what he looked for in music, as listener, performer, and (as he said in Chronicles, about standing too close to Mike Seeger's overwhelming virtuosity in a loft performance: o shit better go be a) writer--of clever timely lyrics and handy P.Domain tunes, like Woody G and others had done, were doing. -

(Wonder if Powers is also still struggling with considerations of, what is it, that there "rockism")

Born in NYC, raised in LA, adoptive parents "wrote music for The Carol Burnett Show, appeared on the Tonight Show"---]she in "psychedelic surf band" and goth band before what she's best known for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_Welch
So I think of her as metabilly, as partial basis for self-expressin, as with Cali's Blasters, CCR etc (also twangy ol' son of Bay Area working class Les Claypool, with his souped-up hot rod prog and all)

Love Gill and Dave, but I am not getting a lot from the new record. Lots of pleasant and pretty songs but nothing I've connected with really.

I really like hashtag?!

Love Gill and Dave, but I am not getting a lot from the new record. Lots of pleasant and pretty songs but nothing I've connected with really.

I like several of the songs individually, but collectively I think it's a bit of a bore — pretty much how I usually respond to them, with Time (the Revelator) as the major exception. It's all very sturdy, but Welch's determined lack of anything but the driest possible humor keeps me at a bit of a distance.

loving the new one — sounds totally great to my ears

fwiw I adored Harrow and Time with plenty of love for the rest of the catalogue as well. This one just lacks mystery I think.

This is making me realize my first impressions of their records has been “this is pleasant enough but maybe lacking” and then their weird tapped-in-to-the-history-of-song starts to unfold. I’m about halfway with this one. Trainload, North Country,and Hashtag have moved into the this-has-always-existed feel for me. Mississippi hit deep for the first time on my last listen.

this is 100% great imho - ok it's intimate and held back and adult but it's so... perfect. Each note is where it should be and their voices sound even better together now hers dropped a bit with age.

something like "north country" is like every song that "americana" artists have been trying to write for like 25 years — and yet in Welch & Rawlings' hands it feels totally fresh. perfect is the right word.

Runnin around
with her
rag
top
down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsC3wsVSJYk

That sounds like Pistol Annies to me, maybe the song they were listening to the night they said, "Fuck it, let's be a band."

Bout time for a tribute album, don't yall think?

This'll do for now:
Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile---Elvis Presley Blues

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NEFBFMAjRk

i think my main disappointment with woodland is the lack of a rythym section. got excited when empty trainload of sky dropped that drums and bass guitar were back.

Gorgeous live version of "Hashtag"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMuwzkPpa7o