Traditional music is full of wild weather and woe. It’s discomfiting, but apt, that life should imitate art in the lives of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings – two singing guitarists feted for their upholding of old musical forms.
Recipients of three Grammys and numerous other gongs over a 30-plus-years career, the Nashville-based couple’s most often record collaboratively, but under separate names. Their latest album is a duo record named after their studio – Woodland – where, in March 2020, a tornado tore most of the roof off just as Covid hit.
The storm threatened to destroy not just all their equipment but their master recordings. The pair and their tour manager battled through a biblical night to save two lives’ work by failing iPhone torch light. That same year, Welch and Rawlings united their names for a quarantine covers album, All the Good Times, which sought to bring succour and long-range musical perspective to the upheavals they, and everyone else, had experienced.
It’s either deluge or desert with Welch and Rawlings, with long gaps between albums being a fan’s customary gripe. The flood, though, prompted the pair to unleash a stream of rarities and outtakes, with three Boots No 2: The Lost Songs volumes released in swift succession. Now Woodland is the first slew of new, original Welch material in 13 long years, while Rawlings’s last solo outing was 2017’s Poor David’s Almanack.
Roughly 100 songs by the pair, seemingly destined for two albums, were whittled down to these 10 exquisite tracks. Woodland is, as ever, steeped in Americana. The pair’s customary stripped-back treatments alternate with more lush orchestrations. Rawlings’s trademark guitar makes lace sparingly, but elegantly.
Significantly, a number of these songs reflect the US as it is now. There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to Covid – “Caught it like a new form of the flu” – on Hashtag, a track from Woodland that usefully points up these two extraordinary artists’ playful relationship with merging old and new. A country song about social media signifiers, and a tribute to the musician Guy Clark, one of the duo’s early champions, who died in 2016, Hashtag wryly ponders the cult musician’s lot: “You laughed and said the news would be bad/ If I ever saw your name with a hashtag,” sings Rawlings, “Singers like you and I/ Are only news when we die.”
Other losses run through the album like rot through wet beams. All plangent pedal steel and glucose-fructose strings, What We Had mourns the unsettling nature of change through the prism of a lapsed love. It’s a duet where the two trade couplets, with Rawlings’s tender higher register recalling Neil Young.
Another standout track, Here Stands a Woman, clocks the progress of age in the mirror, nodding to the folk song Danville Girl (popularised by Woody Guthrie and later Bob Dylan, on Brownsville Girl and New Danville Girl).
But it’s the upheavals of the recent past that reverberate. Welch’s records have always dealt with the here and now couched in period vernacular. (See the “surfer party” in 2001’s My First Lover, the reference to “1900 and 99” in 2011’s Silver Dagger, for two.) Woodland, though, has an unmistakable recent-times edge. Lawman starts with a nod to Lead Belly’s Bring Me a Little Water, Silvy, before chronicling a lover’s death foretold – at the hands of police.
There’s palpable despair at the state of the union in the album’s geographical and spiritual centrepiece, The Day the Mississippi Died. Named after the river that emblematically unites north and south and features in umpteen songs, it starts merrily enough, with fiddle from Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor to the fore. The final verse quotes Blue Tail Fly, a standard with its roots in the era of enslaved people, in which a bug bite prompts a horse to throw an enslaver to his death.
Carefully, Welch picks her way through faultlines between neighbours, before turning her agonised gaze to “Kensington” – at a guess, the Philadelphia neighbourhood notorious for its opioid addiction crisis. She is abject at “the tears, the nightmare years, where madness goes unchecked”. What is there to do but drink whiskey, given the nourishing waters of the river – “a long, long friend” – have dried up?
One of Welch and Rawlings’s greatest assets has been their propensity to witness bleakness with compassion and generosity, while not oversugaring the pill. But not even they could end this elegant, thoughtful track listing on such a hopeless note. One more song “for the road”, Howdy Howdy closes the album with a barely disguised paean to the couple’s continuing union – and bluegrass standard the Spider Bit the Baby. It is “a lonesome valley” they are walking, but they carry on walking it together.
