But then that's the point. Starting with four defiantly hammered-out flattened-fifth chords, the tolling of a bell not quite concurrent with that of St John the Divine, Welch sets out her particular stall from the first line of the first track "Revelator."
"Darling, remember, when you come to me/I'm the pretender and not what I'm supposed to be/But who could know if I'm a traitor?/Time's a revelator." They come to detonate the received notions of country - and indeed those of alt.country (which is now no alt) - within its very epicentre. Wandering around, surf parties, dismissals of white wedding gowns - "leaving the valley and fucking out of sight" she intones demurely in her indeterminate Southern accent - an LA-born offspring of Carol Burnett's old musical director, an attendant of Berklee. "Every word seen in the data/Every day is getting straighter." How distorted is this data to begin with? How much history has she received? How much of it is received?
At the song's climax Rawlings thrashes out some bitonal, aggressively-struck chords, the intimately-miked thwack of fingernail against nylon recorded as closely as Carthy on "Out of the Cut" or Bailey on "Aida."
"My First Lover" continues this not-quite-in-focus lamenting. Recalling an old failed partner and her reluctance to don said "white wedding gown" Welch drifts inexplicably into Steve Miller's "Quicksilver Girl" - itself as much of a virtual "folk song" as anything here.
But this is not the callous aspic-worship of Wynton Marsalis. Nor does it parallel the gratuitous cynicism of Garth Brooks, armed with his MBA.
A pair of comparatively straight love songs follow, but still not traditional. "Dear Someone" is on the face of it as convention as any Patsy Cline ballad (if the latter could be said to be "conventional") but the singer seems to be now revelling in her roving solitude, now anxious at her seeming lack of anchor, human or otherwise. Then there's "Red Clay Halo" the only song here whose lyrics have turned up on Welch websites, all about a poor lass who can't get a guy as she has to walk through red clay (why?) to attend the dance. Her gown will only become golden in the afterlife with a red clay halo around her head. This is not comfy Opry fare.
Next is the first part of a duologue "April the 14th" ostensibly a recollection of Welch visiting a no-budget outdoor festival with a "five-band bill and a two-dollar show ... no one turned up from the local press." The event passes as the sun sets and the sky becomes red. But the song is topped and tailed with seemingly random interjections of disasters which also occurred on April the 14th; the Titanic (the iceberg coming at it like Casey Jones), the Oklahoma dustbowl evacuation and the assassination of Lincoln ("the Great Emancipator took a bullet in the head"). She whispers "hey!" in the fadeout. A warning or a sob?
And then it's the epicentre of this album - which has to be listened to in full and in sequence - "I Want To Sing That Rock And Roll" recorded live at the Opry. Only 2:47 long. Exhausted with travelling and with her guitar, and with "everyone making a noise, so big and loud it's been drowning me out" she wants either to join or to subvert/destroy. The Opry audience whoops its approval of Rawlings' Scotty Moore licks in the middle. It's only when you realise that the track is extracted from the artfully engineered film "Down from the Mountain" that you understand that the audience is one which has seen "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" So they're all conspiring.
After that, a meditation on the consequences of wanting to sing that rock and roll. "Elvis Presley Blues." In the chorus it's unclear whether Welch is singing "I was thinking that night about Elvis - the day that he died" or "did he die?" She ponders his sexuality - "he grabbed his wand in the other hand and shook it like a hurricane ... and he shook it like a holy roller with his soul at stake." At the end of his life, "in long decline" he thinks "how happy John Henry was ... beating his steam drill and he dropped down dead." Welch climaxes with a murmured "bless my soul, what's wrong with me?" A tribute which Freddie Starr will never sing.
Back to "Ruination Day" which picks up from where "April the 14th" left off, but with the chords no longer pensive but askew and disjointed, as with the lyrics. "It was not December and it was not May/Was 14th of April that his ruination day/That's the day that his ruination day." Data is scrambled, the flattened fifths never resolved. Icebergs, bullets, dustbowls and Casey Jones merge into one final divine apocalypse. It is the product of a mind which has turned indeterminate. This is profoundly disturbing listening, the Dorian mode impaled upon John Henry's spear.
The symmetry of the album then resolves with "Everything Is Free" which returns to the "do what I want" ethos of "Dear Someone." The song is apparently about Napster - "gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn't pay - I can get a tip job, gas up the car, try to make a little change down at the bar; or I can get a straight job - I've done it before/Never mind working hard, it's who I'm working for." It's a means, not a purpose. It's defiant. It says fuck you far more fervently than Eminem taking the piss out of Steve Berman (not to deny the worth of the latter).
"Every day I wake up humming a song, but I don't need to run around, I just stay home and sing a little love song, my love and myself/If there's something that you wanna hear, you can sing it yourself - no one's gotta listen to the words in my head." A degree of distance/separation from commerce/the listener/the world which is almost on a par with that of AMM. What is there in MY uselessness, she asks, to cause YOU distress?
And finally to the closer, the unparalleled, unbeatable 14-minute masterpiece "I Dream A Highway" which sums up everything that's come before, attempts to explain it and moves music forward. Barely using three chords, but with every conceivable harmonic, acoustic and temporal variation there could ever be. Once again the protagonist is on the move through place and time. The mental highway is delineated by "a winding ribbon with a band of gold" and a "silver vision" which variously comes and rests, blesses and convalesces her soul.
It starts at the Grand Old Opry - "John (Henry, presumably)'s kicking out the footlights/The Grand Old Opry's got a brand new band/Lord let me die here with a hammer in my hand." In other words, she is here to demolish and destroy the citadel of conservatism. Referring back to Presley, she then plans to "move down into Memphis and thank the hatchet man who forked my tongue/I'll lie in wait until the wagons come" only to find that the "getaway kid" has sent her "an empty wagon full of rattling bones" (from the April 14th concert? From the dustbowl?). Then the revelation itself - "Which lover are you, Jack of Diamonds?/Now you be Emmylou and I'll be Gram." But this itself is a red herring. The confession ensues. "I don't know who I am."
And then it hits you. Underline it, Gillian.
"I'm an indisguisable shade of twilight/Any second now I'm gonna turn myself on/In the blue display of the cool cathode ray."
And you realise that this astonishing piece of music is beyond even a reverie, not the reverie of the dying Charles Foster Kane trying to make a personal sense of his life, but the imagined, implanted reverie we recognise from Blade Runner. It is the American equivalent of Tricky's "Aftermath." A replicant trying to learn and assimilate an alien cultural vocabulary. Bowie's imagined Sinatra gabble at the end of "Low." An alien trying to find its mother, its womb.
Explicitly referred to in the next stanza: "Sunday morning at the diner/Hollywood trembles on the verge of tears/I watch the waitress for a thousand years/Saw a wheel inside a wheel/Heard a call within a call." The cops shooting roses at ET instead of bullets. And, like ET, it awakens from the apparent dead: "Step into the light, poor Lazarus. Don't lie alone behind the window shade. Let me see the mark death made" as the song itself continues to wind down in speed almost imperceptibly, now down to funereal tempo winding the call around the circular spin of its own wheel.
There is no resolution. In the final verse Welch proclaims "what will sustain us through the winter? Where did last year's lessons go? Walk me out into the rain and snow." And the chords continue to occur less frequently. The space becomes more vast. The piece ends (if it can be said to end) with a few basic notes, deliciously hovering on the brink of non-existence (cf. Morton Feldman's Coptic Light, the closing minutes of John Stevens and Evan Parker's The Longest Night Vol 2). It fades, but like the end of Escalator Over The Hill, could theoretically continue forever.
And time resolves upon itself. When I started the preparatory notes for this piece in October 2001, I was still in Oxford and in grief. Perhaps it has required six months for me to bring a piece to a successful conclusion. I now feel differently about many things than I did then, and new light has availed itself upon my threshold.
I can but say that anyone wishing to listen to "Original Pirate Material" should first hear this. The parallels are remarkable; the same leitmotifs obsessively returned to, the same template of hopelessness and conventionality endlessly subverted (for "Casey Jones" read "shit in a tray"); no real ending. An individual decelerating in rebellion against the increased acceleration of the rest of humanity.
This is popular music which defies the undertaking. This is miles ahead.
MC London, April 2002
To R with love. Thanking you for the regeneration.
Amor vincera omnes.
― Marcello Carlin, Sunday, 7 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Ronan, Sunday, 7 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― mark s, Sunday, 7 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Having said that this is nicely written piece. Hopefully I'll hear something from this record.
― Julio Desouza, Sunday, 7 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Sean, Sunday, 7 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Dr. C, Monday, 8 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Jeff W, Monday, 8 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Ned Raggett, Monday, 8 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― powertonevolume, Monday, 8 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― david h, Monday, 8 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Agree that the individual decelerating etc. etc. is not especially radical per se, but the context in which Welch has presented this does in my view (trad.alt?) and the manner in which this is expressed do make it rather radical. Cf. Mike Skinner's parallel deconstruction/desecration/re-creation of UK garage. With Drake, you kind of know what you're going to get (Island '72 - narrowcast demographic). As you imply, I don't particularly want to push Welch into canonisation/Camden Town Good Music Society hell. I have tried to convince Simon R to have a listen but without much success so far - more intent on drawing a line from This Heat/ACR circa '80/81 to Streets/Position Normal.
I do tend to jump several stepping stones of logic at a go - including back and forth (as it tends to fit in better with the tenor of the music I'm talking about, getting beneath its skin etc.) - but really the data question is self-evident from my theory; the replicant in whom this data (country, USA, Titanic) has been implanted and who spends an hour trying to make it into a coherent story with palpable reason. I hope GW herself gets to read the piece; would love to know what gulf (or not) exists between my perception of what she's done and what she felt she set out to do.
Really the answer is to read the piece, in real time, along with the album (that's how I wrote the final draft - "24" style).
But what I would hope to do is to try and sharpen up ideas about the art of listening; about listening to the space between chords, the ethos which has been used to construct the music/lyric interface. To try to break the surface of "yawn trad country zzz" and get to the nerve centre of what is actually going on within this music. Something perhaps close to "the truth" - like the majestic yet immediately forlorn "perfect" opening chord of Vaughan Williams' Tallis Fantasia, which the rest of the piece tries hard to recapture before settling for a compromise; not quite perfection, not quite God, but as near as humanity is going to get, and we should be satisfied with that.
Thanks also for the red clay info - does, as you say, bring a whole new dimension to that song and its relationship to the rest of the album.
― Marcello Carlin, Friday, 12 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
As for the red dirt, I took that as referring to the red dirt of Oklahoma and those kind areas. In that country the dirt really is red so what you've got, in my opinion, is a song about the insecurities of the poor country person toward the city tempered with a sense of defiance as though she's trying to stake a claim that her life is good enough and has value as is.
― Kevin Stahnke, Tuesday, 16 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― david h, Tuesday, 16 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Casey McAllister, Saturday, 25 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
"Welch drifts _inexplicably_ into Steve Miller's "Quicksilver Girl" - itself as much of a virtual "folk song" as anything here."
It's not inexplicable; the lyrics set it up. "Quicksilver Girl" is the song the narrator is listening to while she's losing her virginity.
"Then there's "Red Clay Halo" the only song here whose lyrics have turned up on Welch websites, all about a poor lass who can't get a guy as she has to walk through red clay (why?) to attend the dance. Her gown will only become golden in the afterlife with a red clay halo around her head. This is not comfy Opry fare. "
Well, not exactly. First, it's about a lad, not a lass. "Well the girls all dance with the boys from the city, and they don't care to dance with me." It's about poverty, and a bittersweet fantasy about a heaven for the poor, where those who lived in the dirt have halos and wings made of dirt. As for comfy Opry fare...this song, written by Welch and Rawlings, was originally recorded in 1998 by the Nashville Bluegrass Band. It's a very traditional bluegrass song; poverty, squalor, and sadness are the oldest themes in country and bluegrass music, and have always and will always feature prominently on the Opry. Just a question, and not as pointed as it might appear: Have you ever listened to the Opry? It's easy to imagine what it's like if you haven't, but try listening to it some Saturday on the web. Welch and Rawlings have performed on the Opry a few times, themselves.
"The Opry audience whoops its approval of Rawlings' Scotty Moore licks in the middle. It's only when you realise that the track is extracted from the artfully engineered film "Down from the Mountain" that you understand that the audience is one which has seen "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" So they're all conspiring."
Well, this wasn't performed at the Opry. It was performed at the Ryman Auditorium, which is one of many former homes of the Opry; the Opry is now based, and has been for a long time, at The Grand Ole Opry House in the Disney-like Opryland complex, next to a terrifyingly gigantic shopping mall and chateau-like hotel. It's true that this cut is extracted from the "Down From the Mountain" concert, but it's not true that the audience has seen "O Brother"; the film was still in post-production at the time of the "Down From the Mountain" concert. The concert was simply a gathering of very earnest, straightforward musicians playing very earnest, straightforward music. If there is a hollywood sheen to the film of the concert, it's because the film was made by veteran showbiz documentary filmmakers...the same folks who filmed the Monterery Pop Fest, as well as Bowie's Spiders film and Depeche Mode's 101. Also, audiences whooping approval of guitar/mandolin/dobro/banjo/whatever solos is a bluegrass convention. It's just what's done at bluegrass concerts. I saw Welch and Rawlings recently in Nashville; Rawlings solo'd on every song, and received enthusiastic applause after every solo. He's a damn good guitar player, and deserves every clap. It's not conspiracy, or rebellion. It's all very conventional, traditional, and honest.
The impetus and meaning, incidentally, for "I Want to Sing that Rock N Roll, are here: "The song stems from comments made by Carter Stanley on a live album during the late-'50s' country-music slump, when rock and roll overshadowed everything else." http://www.thestranger.com/2001-12-06/guide2.html
The above link provides an overall excellent historical and interpretational view of this record.
"After that, a meditation on the consequences of wanting to sing that rock and roll. "Elvis Presley Blues." In the chorus it's unclear whether Welch is singing "I was thinking that night about Elvis - the day that he died" or "did he die?" She ponders his sexuality - "he grabbed his wand in the other hand and shook it like a hurricane ... and he shook it like a holy roller with his soul at stake." At the end of his life, "in long decline" he thinks "how happy John Henry was ... beating his steam drill and he dropped down dead." Welch climaxes with a murmured "bless my soul, what's wrong with me?" A tribute which Freddie Starr will never sing."
I kind of like your sexual interpretation here, but I'm afraid it's groundless. Although sexuality does play in here, it's not the point of the song. First, he's "Grabbing ONE in the other hand," not his wand; she's talking about the fusion of racial musical genres; black R&B with white country music. And John Henry is not "Beating his steam drill"...he did, however, defeat ("beat") a steam drill in a race to build a railroad, after which John Henry fell down dead. This is also the source of the lyric, "Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand." For more on John Henry, look here: http://www.ibiblio.org/john_henry/
"Bless my soul, what's wrong with me" is a brilliantly truncated extract from the Elvis track, "I'm all shook up." The entire lyric, which Welch has added to the song in live performance, is "Bless my soul, what's wrong with me/ I'm itchin like a bear on a fuzzy tree."
"It says fuck you far more fervently than Eminem taking the piss out of Steve Berman. "
Now THAT I can agree with!
"This is popular music which defies the undertaking. This is miles ahead. "
Thing is, though, this isn't popular music. It's pretty underground, by most American standard. The only Gillian you'll really hear on the radio is "I'll Fly Away" from the O Brother soundtrack. This music is miles and miles and miles behind, and miles ahead, and right on time. It overlaps old-time music with Woody Guthrie with Bob Dylan with The Stanley Brothers with Elvis with Blind Willie Johnson with Dead Kennedys with Kitty Wells with everything else. It's basically the whole history of RCA Studio B (Where it was recorded) all coming through at once. It's kind of ultimate postmodernism with all its machine noise turned down, so that the only noise is the noise of analogue tape, and yes, of fingers clicking on the strings.
― St. Brendan, Nashville TN, Wednesday, 12 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Sean Carruthers, Wednesday, 12 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
I just wanted to add one little note for posterity's sake. The association of John in "I Dream a Highway" with John Henry is wrong. Like many of the other characters in this song, she's refering to a singer -- here Johnny Cash. Back when Johnny Cash was really screwed up on drugs and alcohol, he wreaked a little hell at the Grand Old Opry. At this show, he walked around the stage and kicked out the stage lights. The audience and the powers that be at the Grand Old Opry freaked and Mr. Cash was banned from the Grand Old Opry for many years.
She does go on to tie Johnny Cash in with John Henry in her reference to the hammer, but her initial reference is explicitly referring to the former.
― Bob Brookins, Wednesday, 5 February 2003 06:23 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Hurting (Hurting), Tuesday, 21 December 2004 05:49 (nineteen years ago) link
Nothing as erudite as all the musings upthread. Just wanted to note that Gillian & David's cover of Black Star is excellent.
― that's not my post, Tuesday, 23 October 2007 03:59 (sixteen years ago) link
Yeah, they did that when I saw them live and it was quite striking
― Hurting 2, Tuesday, 23 October 2007 04:08 (sixteen years ago) link
No album in four years though and no current tours.
― Hurting 2, Tuesday, 23 October 2007 04:09 (sixteen years ago) link
lazy zing x 1000, and yet...
http://media.npr.org/images/podcasts/primary/npr_music_image_300.jpg
― gershy, Tuesday, 23 October 2007 04:16 (sixteen years ago) link
thanks for the pointer to the WFUV - Bonnaroo interview. Sounds like they are at least starting to pull together some new material.
― that's not my post, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 05:10 (sixteen years ago) link
I love Soul Journey as a deliberate full album, how the final lines rhyme "mall" (mall!) and "ball" and refer to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and how they've got electric guitars for the first time in this song, and it feels like the end of a two-album or maybe four-album song cycle.
Also I love how each of her records sets up particular conventions in the first minute or two that define the parameters of what we'll hear: the dissonant opening to Time, the drums on Soul Journey.
I mean, there are plenty of other pleasures in this music, but their structure as full albums is part of it.
― Eazy, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 05:23 (sixteen years ago) link
Revelator is conceptually brilliant.
― roxymuzak, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 06:10 (sixteen years ago) link
WHAT DO I PLAY TO SEDUCE CORNY FOLK FUCK
― gershy, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 06:53 (sixteen years ago) link
For me, it's been downhill since Revival, and her reference to Gram Parsons pretty much takes all the fun out of ODing in a cheap motel room with a groupie.
― If Timi Yuro would be still alive, most other singers could shut up, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 08:16 (sixteen years ago) link
i think revelator is the only record where she figured out how to do something wholly her own. still shows all her obvious debts and influences, and still indulges in some po-faced po'-folks stuff, but the musical and lyrical reference points are farther flung and more mysterious than on the other albums. i think it's really a great record. the songs stand up individually but also cohere into something greater, mystical, apocalyptic (and/or rapturous, if there's a difference).
on another note, anyone heard tim and mollie o'brien's cover of "wichita"? that's one of my favorite non-revelator gil songs, but she hasn't released a version of it herself as far as i know. the o'briens version is great.
― tipsy mothra, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 18:03 (sixteen years ago) link
Yeah, I totally agree about Revelator, and Soul Journey was a bit of a letdown in that regard - I mean not that she went backward or anything, but the album didn't add up to much for me.
― Hurting 2, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 18:11 (sixteen years ago) link
I also really like the Nowhere Man/Whiskey Girl song for similar reasons (does something her own, loses the po-faced schtick)
― Hurting 2, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 18:12 (sixteen years ago) link
All the talk of Red Clay upthread reminded me of this story
― James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 18:23 (sixteen years ago) link
I guess taste is taste, but I can't help but think that people who use the "NPR music" zing are more interested in stylistic than qualitative distinctions.
― Hurting 2, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 18:30 (sixteen years ago) link
I mean i remember that xhucx kept calling her "schoolmarm folk," and I can hardly accuse him of being deaf to qualitative distinctions, but I don't hear schoolmarm folk in Gillian Welch at all.
― Hurting 2, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 18:32 (sixteen years ago) link
well there is something a little antiseptic about her, although in a somewhat complicated way (as marcello's first post does a good job of illuminating: "too impeccable to be real; not enough dirt on her boots, not enough creases in his suit. But then that's the point.")
i understand complaints about her humorlessness, even though i think she's funny sometimes, and as far as neo-authenticity goes she can be a big offender. but that's one reason i think revelator is her best record, because it kind of moved beyond a lot of that. a few songs aside (including "red clay halo," which i like a lot anyway because it's a good tune), it's not particularly mannered or self-consciously rootsy.
"npr music" though is just as dumb as any other dumb tag. bob dylan is npr music too. so is ella fitzgerald. and?
― tipsy mothra, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 19:12 (sixteen years ago) link
I always thought "Red Clay Halo" was a cover - it sounds like some kind of traditional song that's filtered down over the years into the martyr complex of mainstream country (and a lot of rural, or wannabe rural, white people - them big city elites are making fun of us!).
― milo z, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 19:46 (sixteen years ago) link
guess I missed the secret sign that "npr music" was supposed to be trenchant criticism. ok, you've convinced me that she's crap. will stop listening to her and all other npr crap immediately.
― that's not my post, Thursday, 25 October 2007 06:24 (sixteen years ago) link
Can we agree on a definition - "NPR Rock" ??
― gershy, Thursday, 25 October 2007 06:46 (sixteen years ago) link
ROFFLE:
somewhere between crowded house and wilco.
-- stockholm cindy (winter version) (Jody Beth Rosen), Friday, 20 January 2006 05:12 (1 year ago) Link ...there lies obsession.
-- Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 20 January 2006 05:32 (1 year ago) Link
― Hurting 2, Thursday, 25 October 2007 14:01 (sixteen years ago) link
This thread reminds me of what Tom Smucker (quoted by Xgau) said about Woodstock: "I left one thing out of my Woodstock article. I left out how boring it was."
― Jazzbo, Thursday, 25 October 2007 14:18 (sixteen years ago) link
No album in four years though and no current tours.― Hurting 2, Tuesday, October 23, 2007 5:09 AM (11 months ago) Bookmark
― Hurting 2, Tuesday, October 23, 2007 5:09 AM (11 months ago) Bookmark
What is up with that?
― caek, Wednesday, 22 October 2008 00:56 (fifteen years ago) link
weirder is that there kind of were tours, right? like a bunch of american shows a year ago, maybe. she's got really good new songs, too.
― schlump, Wednesday, 22 October 2008 01:12 (fifteen years ago) link
I am watching this right now: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0074qnh/BBC_Four_Sessions_Gillian_Welch/
― caek, Wednesday, 22 October 2008 01:13 (fifteen years ago) link
(which that Youtube is from)
yeah funny that it's been so long since her last record! i interviewed her in 2005, i think, and at the time she hinted that a new record was imminent. guess not! she did say that she liked having her own label because it allowed her to go by her own timeline. have heard one amazing new song "the way it will be" that they play live. though calling it new at this point is silly, i think I heard them do it in 2003 ...
― tylerw, Wednesday, 22 October 2008 03:13 (fifteen years ago) link
saw her in brooklyn last year and she was grrr8
― Surmounter, Wednesday, 22 October 2008 03:40 (fifteen years ago) link
website lists a bunch of albums that she and david rawlings have "appeared" on, no tour dates
― Tyrone Quattlebaum (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 22 October 2008 03:44 (fifteen years ago) link
I kind of assumed after Everything Is Free and Wrecking Ball that she'd just never bother recording for public release again.
― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, 22 October 2008 08:30 (fifteen years ago) link
New album due next year according to metacritic; no release date as yet.
― Eric in the East Neuk of Anglia (Marcello Carlin), Wednesday, 22 October 2008 08:48 (fifteen years ago) link
fantastic — so lush! kind of like a comes a time-era Neil song.
― tylerw, Friday, 23 August 2024 15:18 (two weeks ago) link
First impression: It definitely has a different vibe from past albums. Still fully her, but just a little less traditional.
― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Friday, 23 August 2024 15:53 (two weeks ago) link
That track is great, thanks!
― The Zing from Another URL (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 23 August 2024 16:21 (two weeks ago) link
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.
― curmudgeon, Sunday, 25 August 2024 23:07 (two weeks ago) link
called Revival a “handcrafted simulacrum” of roots music instead of recognizing it as the real thing it was.
― dow, Sunday, 25 August 2024 23:36 (two weeks ago) link
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
― Paul Ponzi, Monday, 26 August 2024 09:58 (two weeks ago) link
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.
― alpine static, Monday, 26 August 2024 14:47 (two weeks ago) link
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.
― alpine static, Monday, 26 August 2024 14:49 (two weeks ago) link
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.
― Skrot Montague, Monday, 26 August 2024 14:51 (two weeks ago) link
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.
― It was on a accident (hardcore dilettante), Monday, 26 August 2024 16:55 (two weeks ago) link
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.
― Cow_Art, Monday, 26 August 2024 16:58 (two weeks ago) link
He sings harmony throughout. On a few songs, he takes lead for certain verses, but not extensively. It’s still mostly Gillian singing lead.
― Skrot Montague, Monday, 26 August 2024 17:09 (two weeks ago) link
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.
― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, 26 August 2024 17:56 (two weeks ago) link
Willie Dixon who Led Zeppelin stole from was himself a notorious song thief
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, 26 August 2024 18:04 (two weeks ago) link
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.
― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, 26 August 2024 18:10 (two weeks ago) link
"the queen of fakes and imitators"
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, 26 August 2024 18:27 (two weeks ago) link
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.
― Theracane Gratifaction (bendy), Monday, 26 August 2024 18:31 (two weeks ago) link
The problem with authenticity is solely with the listener. It often dupes people into liking really boring shit
― Heez, Monday, 26 August 2024 19:25 (two weeks ago) link
i prefer fakely boring shit
― mark s, Monday, 26 August 2024 19:30 (two weeks ago) link
It’s just good ol’ gatekeeping as usual
― assert (matttkkkk), Monday, 26 August 2024 19:48 (two weeks ago) link
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.
― dentist looking too comfortable singing the blues (hardcore dilettante), Monday, 26 August 2024 21:39 (two weeks ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPBR8sB1W30
― The Zing from Another URL (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 26 August 2024 21:46 (two weeks ago) link
I didn't spend much time with Harrow until relatively recently. Really like Scarlet Town and Hard Times.
― that's not my post, Tuesday, 27 August 2024 01:47 (two weeks ago) link
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, babyBill 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. -
― dow, Tuesday, 27 August 2024 02:50 (two weeks ago) link
(Wonder if Powers is also still struggling with considerations of, what is it, that there "rockism")
― dow, Tuesday, 27 August 2024 02:53 (two weeks ago) link
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_WelchSo 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)
― dow, Tuesday, 27 August 2024 03:10 (two weeks ago) link
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.
― assert (matttkkkk), Tuesday, 3 September 2024 07:29 (one week ago) link
I really like hashtag?!
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, 3 September 2024 14:08 (one week ago) link
― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Tuesday, 3 September 2024 15:57 (one week ago) link
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.
― Blitz Primary (tipsy mothra), Tuesday, 3 September 2024 16:24 (one week ago) link
loving the new one — sounds totally great to my ears
― tylerw, Tuesday, 3 September 2024 16:42 (one week ago) link
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.
― assert (matttkkkk), Tuesday, 3 September 2024 22:55 (one week ago) link
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.
― Theracane Gratifaction (bendy), Tuesday, 3 September 2024 23:50 (one week ago) link
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.
― StanM, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 14:51 (one week ago) link
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.
― tylerw, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 15:07 (one week ago) link
Runnin aroundwith herragtopdown.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsC3wsVSJYk
― dow, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 17:23 (one week ago) link
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."
― dow, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 17:25 (one week ago) link
Bout time for a tribute album, don't yall think?
― dow, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 17:27 (one week ago) link
This'll do for now:Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile---Elvis Presley Blues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NEFBFMAjRk
― dow, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 17:31 (one week ago) link
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.
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, 5 September 2024 17:13 (six days ago) link
Gorgeous live version of "Hashtag"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMuwzkPpa7o
― Blitz Primary (tipsy mothra), Friday, 6 September 2024 05:36 (five days ago) link
there's about 5 songs from that show on youtube (the others are audience recordings) btw
― StanM, Friday, 6 September 2024 13:28 (five days ago) link
e.g. I Hear Them All (David Rawlings Machine) / This Land Is Your Land:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX9_GReUhFE
― StanM, Friday, 6 September 2024 13:35 (five days ago) link
they're going to reissue Time The Revelator and after that the first two albums - oh, and Rawlings has links to the Corning Gorilla Glass people :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrYg6Xz0DXg
― StanM, Friday, 6 September 2024 14:20 (five days ago) link
Beautiful version of hashtag - thanks for sharing.
― that's not my post, Friday, 6 September 2024 22:43 (five days ago) link
First listen last night and enjoyed it. It's almost got a sophistipop sheen to it in places, which I am very much here for. Rawlings-sung tunes are probably the weakest ones here.
― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Saturday, 7 September 2024 09:39 (four days ago) link
they're going to reissue Time The Revelator and after that the first two albums - oh, and Rawlings has links to the Corning Gorilla Glass people :-)📹
― dentist looking too comfortable singing the blues (hardcore dilettante), Saturday, 7 September 2024 23:51 (four days ago) link
I know it's obtuse and basic to say this, but: when you have a voice like Welch's in the band, and a liquid, endlessly inventive guitarist like Rawlings, choosing to forego those things to have Dave sing simpler fingerpicked songs seems, I don't know, somehow bloody-minded to me. I get it, he's essential, they're equal partners, but hand on heart there is never a moment I'd prefer to hear him singing than her. Hashtag sure is a lovely song, but it quickens to life when Gill sings.Also musicians don't obsess about sound quality because their hearing is often shot.
― assert (matttkkkk), Sunday, 8 September 2024 01:33 (three days ago) link
(that interviewer is Michael Fremer who's been an audio gear reviewer for 30+ years, first at Stereophile / Analog Planet and latterly Tracking Angle.)
― assert (matttkkkk), Sunday, 8 September 2024 01:36 (three days ago) link
― dentist looking too comfortable singing the blues (hardcore dilettante), Sunday, 8 September 2024 04:34 (three days ago) link