Gillian Welch

I've seen her - or them - live twice, and both times they were really mesmerising. I can understand the impulse that lies behind one finding her dull, but I can't excuse it. ;-) "Time (The Revelator)" and "Soul Journey" are both really good albums.

I used to dismiss her, but it was actually Dave Rawlings' album that brought me around.

I'd say she/they are incomparably wonderful compared to the vast majority of comparable artists in their (supposed) field. which would probably be 'alt country' / 'americana' of course

ive listened to time the revelator so much over these past months. its kindof difficult to talk about it without getting into cliches about haunting reveries or something. im interested in the closing song though, i dream a highway. its part of the tradition of folk epics about the conflation of large themes with small details. i like how it uses that form, the folk song with the endless verses and makes it feel so stretched out and distended. this combined with the road imagery makes me think of like krautrock and kraftwerk but instead of the gleaming autobahns of the future its the dusty roads out of the past. idk how relevant or interesting this is to anybody its just something i noticed and seems kindof pertinent to the ways their formalisms work a kindof postmodern filtering of tradition, i mean you could almost not notice it at all.

i mentioned liking GW a little after i heard her, and the girl i was talking to kinda took a moment and then said, ah, right; adult contemporary.

xp at jamie btw

streaming on npr. sounds very nice. http://www.npr.org/2011/06/26/137346722/first-listen-gillian-welch-the-harrow-and-the-harvest

weird that there are three "the way" songs here .

i'm loving this album.

what I said upthread about the 1st half dominating still holds, except that "Hard Times" might be the best thing on it. Mind you I have an irrational annoyance towards the old-timey lyrical bent to some tunes ("Down Along the Dixie Line," "The Way the Whole Thing Ends").

Worth the wait.

Great show at the Warfield in SF tonight. The new tunes sounded fab & slotted right in with the old. Gillian danced!

Rawlings is the most original guitar player of his generation

Alec Wilkinson on the New Yorker blog

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/07/gillian-welch-the-harrow-and-the-harvest.html#ixzz1RaPygURc

Some weird hyperbole in that piece. "No guitarist at the moment is more immediately recognizable." I mean, I love Rawlings and think he's an incredible guitarist doing neat things in a tradition-based medium. I could listen to an album of just him playing guitar. But at the same time, he's beholden enough to the style of said medium that I don't hear him as nearly as distinctive as the author. He's a virtuoso, like Chris Thile, but because he plays in service of such a specific style - and because he's so tasteful to boot - he does a good job disappearing into the music.

New album is nice, by the way, but almost perverse in that it followed such a long wait, seeing as it's not terribly substantial or substantive (in the general sense; those words read more negative than I'd intend).

"Dark Turn of Mind" is hot/scary

xpost yeah, "most original" is a stretch too. I mean maybe he's the most original bluegrassy/flatpickin-acoustic guitarist of his generation or something, but most original guitarist is kind of silly, especially in a generation that has a lot of really interesting guitarists.

Damn this is a great album.

First reaction to this is that on some songs I find her studied drawl to be grating. I think that's actually when I like her least -- when she's really pushing the not-quite-geographically-placeable 'southern' diction the hardest, which also usually happens to be on the most not-quite-placeably "traditional" sounding songs. I like her best when she breaks away from this, e.g. on The Way it Will Be.

As "smart" folk music, not bad, but when she sang, with sincerity, "that's the way the cornbread crumbles" I got hungry and wandered into the kitchen for a brownie.

I guess I hoped Time the Revelator was going to signal a gradual new direction, although Soul Journey dispelled that idea. Her gothic Americana schtick on songs like Tennessee just seems dreary and tired, like, ok we get it, country life with a dark underbelly, the exact same dark underbelly each time, one that feels more like an approximation of something from literature or film than something lived. Somehow the result is even more two-dimensional than the simple, traditional folk tunes like Six White Horses.

I like the songs that have more California and less country, but there aren't enough of those.

They're gonna be on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross today

So where's the Pitchfork review?

too Americana maybe

She sounds like a countrified Jennifer Herrema on The Way It Goes. Brilliant album, are her other albums similar?

Yeah, her other albums are VERY similar IMO.

Time The Revelator is probably the best.

Very special show in Montreal last night. (Her first-ever visit.)

just saw her play two sets in tucson. this woman is the fucking bomb.

"ok we get it, country life with a dark underbelly, the exact same dark underbelly each time, one that feels more like an approximation of something from literature or film than something lived."

That's because she's an LA gal whose parents were both in entertainment and her work is just as much acting as it is music. I'm not gonna play the authenticity card, because the same thing is true of Tom Waits, but she always sounded like she was trying a bit too hard.

I did enjoy her live though. She has that quietly spellbinding quality.

i don't know, the whole "she's not *really* going down in the coal mines" thing is such a non-starter. it could be applied to pretty much any of the great singer-songwriters of the last 75 years. who says you have to "live" something to write a song about it? i mean, either you buy it or you don't, but let's not pretend that, say, hank williams was any less of an "actor."

kinda reminds me of joni mitchell saying that bob dylan was a 'phony.' he is, but who cares?

yeah he's totally a phony! and he's great!

pretty sure greil marcus hates gillian welch (and lucinda williams) for exactly these reasons, tho.

I'm excited to hear a new Gillian Welch album! Soul Journey wasn't bad but didn't live up to the hope of the previous albums, which I played to death for a while. Seems like Ilx has always been unfairly harsh on most alt country guys and gays. Never understood why.

ilx loves the alt country gays.
no, i really like the latest one. they are masters at the acoustic duo thing.

Oh um I meant gals.

ha yeah, i figured. i'd imagine the general disinterest is due at least in part to the rockist wars of 2004-ish. in a lot of ways, alt-country was presented as this "real, authentic" thing, which rubs everyone the wrong way (with good reason). doesn't mean that there weren't/aren't good songwriters/bands in there though. funny that gillian welch gets in trouble for not being authentic enough though.

lyrically she hasn't reached the highs of TtR again, but damn, those are such good lyrics it would be about impossible.

If you don't like Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, I don't really have much to say to you.

I listened to a Dave Rawlings Machine album and was underwhelmed by his vocals. He's listenable but just in a guy at am open-mike at a bar singing folk and country kinda way.

Do you mean the new one? I dunno - I like it OK. I especially like that long one, "The Trip," which makes me think he's been listening to T-Bone Burnett's "The Murder Weapon" (and actually a lot of songs from that Proof Through the Night album, come to think of it). I always check out what he's up to, and while I'm never knocked out, I'm never turned off, either.

Now, can someone explain why the hell none of the Gillian Welch albums have been released on vinyl? Surely a 180 gram reissue of Time (The Revelator) has "RSD release" written all over it.

"Ok" is the key. He is just ok.

I do like some of the live David Rawlings clips:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er-3YLVIONc

I really love "Bells of Harlem". Didn't know there was a new one.

i always thought that was a song written by ryan adams. apparently they wrote it together. anyways it is one of the highlights of heartbreaker, ryan adams amazing debut.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_c1YM53Wwo

this is exciting.

If there are future volumes for each album in her discography, I will probably buy them all. Hoping too this means a vinyl issue of Time The Revelator is being planned. One of the few albums for which I would unhesitatingly plunk down for a super deluxe vinyl box set

Oooh, my wife will like that and want to hear the unreleased songs. Me, I'm just kinda curious

If this thing is being released only on cd, why does that give us hope that TTR will get a vinyl look-in?

I guess my thinking was that if she's at the stage in her career in which the catalogue is being reassessed, eventually a full vinyl reissue campaign would have to follow. I bet they'll wait for RSD or something, but it's pretty strange that TTR has never had a vinyl release. In short, it's just wishful thinking on my part, I guess!

Surprise new album!!

https://gillianwelch.bandcamp.com/album/all-the-good-times