Woodland, the new album by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, takes its name from Woodland Sound Studios in East Nashville, a place with deep significance to the duo. Back in the ’70s, Woodland hosted sessions for albums like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken and Neil Young’s Comes a Time that helped lay the groundwork for what eventually became known as Americana—and for Welch and Rawlings’ own musical world. In the mid-’90s, Welch and Rawlings recorded their debut, Revival, at Woodland with producer T Bone Burnett. In 2002, Welch and Rawlings purchased the studio, which was shuttered following a dispute over damage from a tornado, and brought it back to life. But then in early March 2020, they nearly lost Woodland, and all its instruments and recording archives, when the building took yet another direct hit from a tornado—just a few weeks before the Covid pandemic broke.
Out of these strange and trying times, and from the rebuilt studio, comes Welch and Rawlings’ first set of new original songs since 2017. Woodland both extends and deepens their 30-year quest to create new music with the clarity, economy, and staying power of traditional folk. While half the album features band backing and even some string arrangements by Rawlings, at the core of the music—as always—is the extraordinary braiding of their voices and acoustic guitars.
During the lead-up to the album release, I caught up with Rawlings and Welch in separate conversations to learn more about the writing and recording of their latest songs, and the vintage guitar discoveries that helped shape them.
Tuning Up at Home
In the aftermath of the tornado, which left Woodland with collapsed ceilings and major flooding, Rawlings devoted himself to salvaging the studio. “I’ve been in this building for 14 to 16 hours a day for the last five years,” says Rawlings, speaking on a summer afternoon from Woodland, on a break from cutting lacquers for the album’s vinyl master. “I mean, really nowhere else, literally every single day.”
During this lengthy rehabilitation, and the pandemic pause in Welch and Rawlings’ touring life, they realized that their writing and music needed to continue. “When we bought Woodland, we were both over there, pulling wire and installing the control room glass and putting it all together,” Welch recalls. “But this time around in the reconstruction from the tornado, it was really Dave. We decided to divide and conquer. So he would go over there, and I would stay at the house and write. And when he would knock off and come home, we would work on whatever I had done that day.”
This division of labor worked well because of the difference in their writing styles, she says. “I’m more the sit-on-the-couch-for-six-hours, meditative sort of writer, and he’s the five-minutes-brushing-his-teeth-in-the-bathroom writer. Certain people would perhaps be jealous that he works so much faster. But really, I enjoy the meditative aspect of the work I do. I mean, what else would I want to do? I really like sitting on the couch with my guitar.”
The long breaks from the road in recent years brought Welch and Rawlings unexpected benefits—especially more singing in the living room than they had done since first moving to Nashville, before their first record. “You know, when you put out a record and start to have success, most of your singing starts to be done in public,” Welch says. “I love singing from the stage—it requires its own sort of musculature. But I really believe there are things you only learn singing and playing with nobody listening to you in your own living room.”
She adds, “Dave and I have always been close enough to chamber music that, in a way, the more important subtleties are in the air between what I’ll call our four instruments—two guitars and two voices. I feel like we got recalibrated and more in tune with those sounds. I think maybe it was time for a tune-up.”
Two for One
Like their last studio release, the Grammy-winning covers collection All the Good Times (Are Past and Gone), the Woodland album is credited to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings—a departure from years of billing themselves on record with her name alone. Along the way there have been projects where Rawlings has top billing and the vocal spotlight—like the band-oriented David Rawlings Machine records or Poor David’s Almanack from 2017. According to Rawlings, the change to using both of their names on All the Good Times and Woodland reflects the simple fact that, unlike on earlier records, they are splitting lead vocals.
“I didn’t think it would really work to put out a Gillian Welch record and then have me singing a couple songs on it, you know?” he says. “We’re coming out of the tradition of singer-songwriters where the person whose name is on there is generally who’s singing.” He adds with a laugh, “I don’t know of any Bob Dylan tracks where Neil Young sings.”
Billing the duo under two names does not signify a difference in how they collaborate, however. “We’ve written songs every which way, but I wouldn’t say the overarching structure has changed much,” Rawlings notes. And the goal remains the same.
“I mean, we always aspire to figure out how to write better songs,” he says. “You can look around and see the things people are doing or have done that are so great and that you admire so much, and you want to try to figure out how to contribute to that body of work. It takes a lot of thought and care to even dip your toe in that water or come close. So I feel like songwriting is a job that you never finish, and there’s a lot of mystery in how you get the very best stuff—and also a lot of plain old hard work that you do.”
Woodland adds some gems to the duo’s repertoire that came to life in varied ways. “Empty Trainload of Sky,” the minor-key folk rocker that kicks off the album, grew from its title phrase and the arresting image of “a boxcar of blue showing daylight clear through.”
The song began with “almost a vision,” Welch recalls. “I was taking a walk, and I really did see the evening freight train going over the Cumberland River trestle. And I had a really dislocating moment where these boxcars looked like they were full of sky. It literally stopped me in my tracks, and I couldn’t figure out what I was seeing. It was just a super surreal moment. I sat down on the bench right there, and I didn’t get up until I had the title and the beginning of the song. I just drilled it into my mind. When I got home, I told Dave about it, and we were off to the races writing a song together.”
“Hashtag,” sung by Rawlings, is dedicated to Guy Clark—though he isn’t named in the lyrics. Several years before Welch and Rawlings put out their first record, the legendary troubadour brought the duo as openers on a national tour.
“It would be hard to overstate what that experience meant,” says Welch. “I think our whole notion of what it was going to mean to have a life in music came from that time. That’s when we really saw, what does it look like if you devote your life to this? What does that mean you’re doing? Well, that means driving up and down the interstates all over the place, and you get to know them. Now, this was before GPS and before cell phones. Guy would tell us what was important—where to stop and get lunch between Houston and Dallas, what hotels to stay in. That was the first glimpse that we had of what life on the road was really like.”
Tapping into Tradition
Close followers of Welch and Rawlings’ music will notice that one track on Woodland, “Lawman,” is a completely rewritten version of a song they performed 15-plus years ago but never recorded.
The new “Lawman” opens with the line “Sylvie gonna bring a little water”—a clear nod to Lead Belly’s “Bring Me a Little Water, Silvy.” I ask Welch whether they consciously look for these sorts of echoes of older songs, a common occurrence in their writing.
“I think they just kind of come out,” she says. “You try to put enough language and imagery into the hopper, and then they all combine in different ways and attach to whatever you’re trying to express in the moment. Folk music is such a deep well, I’d be a fool not to use it.
“That’s one of the things I love about working in the continuum of folk music, which Dave and I are now part of. I just love the way traditional language comes to my rescue when I need it. It’s very rich for me. We’re always trying to make a very simple statement multilayered, multidimensional. For me, that’s really the pinnacle of what we’re trying to do. I want this very simple thing to be both small and enormous simultaneously.”
I ask Welch whether achieving that simplicity means leaving a lot on the cutting room floor in the writing process.
“Sometimes they just come out that way—like the chorus of ‘Miss Ohio’ came out that way, like a little nursery rhyme almost,” Welch says. “But other times, I use the eraser more than the pencil, always trying to get to the beautiful feeling that is so common in the best folk songs, where they’re eminently specific and yet endlessly universal. That’s what we’re shooting for. That’s what really moves us. I mean, it moves me beyond speech when I hear, like, ‘Dark was the night, cold was the ground.’ It’s just profoundly beautiful, not to mention the music.”
She adds, “There’s really nothing I feel or see or care to express that seems to fall outside of the ability of folk music to contain. It never lets me down. And the more years that have gone by, and the more big human experiences I’ve had, like the death of both my parents, I find that there is nothing folk music won’t take. It’s there for humans; it’s made human size. It was made to deal with catastrophic occurrences, both personal and global. It was made to help people deal with the world, and I’m just so happy that it still works.”
The Guitar Landscape
Listening to Woodland, I am struck anew by the stunning clarity of their guitar work, with Welch laying down supple, understated rhythm while Rawlings adds cross-picked fills and cascading leads on top. The guitars each have their own space—in terms of tone, texture, and often register too.
One striking guitar moment on Woodland comes in “The Bell and the Birds,” where Rawlings plays a haunting harmonics riff over Welch’s minor-key fingerpicking. I ask Rawlings whether they tend to find parts like these during the writing process, or in a later stage of guitar arranging.
“Sometimes Gill will have a part that is developed as the song is being written,” he says. “I think when she started ‘The Bells and the Birds,’ her fingerpicking part came first, in which case that part is baked in.” Rawlings’ harmonics riff came as a literal response to the lyrics: “Listen how the bells they ring in the morning/ What do they say to you my love?” He says, “I’d always had a desire to do more stuff with harmonics, using a little more dissonance with them. That starts with minor second harmonics—that’s an interesting sound.”
With other songs, it might take the duo a while after the basic music and lyrics are in place to find the right instrumental setting. With the album closer, “Howdy Howdy,” Rawlings notes, “We were enjoying the lyric and the melody in the way it felt, but we didn’t really have a good way to play it. We were just really fighting with making it something we cared about deeply—until I suggested that Gill try it on banjo. I literally remember saying, ‘This will never work, but why don’t we just try it on the banjo—maybe do it out of sawmill tuning’ [G D G C D]. As soon as she played three notes, I’m like, ‘OK, it’s good. I’ll figure out some guitar to fall in with that.’”
Across the album, Rawlings delivers beautiful fill/lead work, with his trademark close intervals and touches of dissonance, harp-like effects, and unexpected note choices—he remains one of the most distinctive lead guitar stylists in the acoustic music world. (For a lesson on his guitar work, see the December 2017 issue.) Less prominent but foundational to their sound is Welch’s rhythm playing, which is so in the pocket yet also breathes, keeping human rather than metronomic time.
As a guitarist, Welch says her job in the duo is “to expand the space as much as I can. Considering how small our band is, one of the ways we expand is into quietness, air, space. One of the parameters is total silence, you know? I would never want to fill up the space, so I’m not much of a strummer. I try to parcel out the guitar into the downbeats, bass notes, backbeats, the booms and the changs.
“It’s also my job to keep the groove but not let things get static. I’m the drummer. I love the drums—I played the drums as a child. It was Karen Carpenter who got me interested in drumming, but it was too loud for me. I was kind of a sensitive kid, and I just didn’t want to make that much noise. So I asked for an acoustic guitar.”
Welch’s notion of expanding the space with her guitar relates directly to her
goal with language—making small things suggest larger things.
“This runs through what Dave and I do, a kind of inherent magic trick of the miniature,” she says. “There’s something almost reality-altering in minimalism, and if you dive into it enough, it can become panoramic. That’s when we know we’re on the right path. You start to be able to see into a track and kind of inhabit it, get in there and have it all around you, even though it’s this very small thing with just two acoustic guitars.”
Vintage Voices
For many years, Welch and Rawlings have created their signature sound on the same guitars: a 1956 Gibson J-50 flattop for Welch and a 1935 Epiphone Olympic archtop for Rawlings. Both guitars are on Woodland (and Rawlings played another Olympic from the same year on “The Bell and the Birds”), but the album also features some other notable instruments.
On “Lawman” and “What We Had,” Rawlings played a rare recent acquisition: a 1949 Epiphone Emperor Concert built for jazz guitarist Johnny Smith with a trapezoidal soundhole, one of only three known examples of this model. “Johnny Smith’s idea was that if you didn’t put f-holes, and you put a bigger soundhole near the fingerboard, you could have the braces go the full length of the instrument without breaking them,” Rawlings says.
On “Lawman,” Rawlings played the Emperor in dropped-D tuning (capo IV) above Welch’s fingerstyle part. “Gill’s guitar is kind of in the midrange,” he says. “That Epiphone goes below it and above it, and it gave us a really big guitar sound. It’s different than anything we’ve done.”
Another vintage find on the album, played by Welch, is a 1940 Gibson J-35 previously owned by Ed Bruce, writer of “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” “It is a crusher,” Welch says. “Some of the songs on this record were written on that guitar. I found it really inspiring.”
On Woodland she also played her first steel-string guitar, a 1986 Guild D-25M; a rosewood 1929 Gibson Nick Lucas Special that she got from Normal Blake; and a mahogany 1929 Martin 2-17 (heard on “Here Stands a Woman”).
“That is a freaky guitar,” she says of the Martin parlor. “It is our most miniaturized. It barely makes any noise. But through a microphone, it almost sounds like you have an upright bass with you. It goes so low. It has ancient strings, probably from the ’50s. One broke one time and Dave knotted it back on. So it’s a crazy guitar, but it’s truly magic. I’ve never heard another guitar that did what that little Martin does.”
Rounding out the Woodland instrumental lineup are two vintage banjos: Rawlings played a 1928 Vega guitar banjo on “Lawman,” and on “Howdy Howdy,” Welch picked a 1925 Vega Whyte Laydie #7.
Growing from the Roots
Over the last 30 years, Welch and Rawlings’ commitment to the acoustic duo format has never wavered, but the scene surrounding them has changed dramatically. Compared with the ’90s, many more younger musicians, it seems, are exploring stripped-down acoustic styles, inspired in no small part by Welch and Rawlings; and these days all musicians in the folk/country/roots realm benefit from the emergence of Americana as an industry and marketing umbrella.
I ask Rawlings for his perspective on the growth of acoustic Americana—and the duo’s part in it. “You know, that music was there even when we started,” he says. “When we came to Nashville and got our first booking agent, Keith Case and Associates, he represented John Hartford, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark. Norman Blake was out there playing shows. When we went to MerleFest, we realized there might have been a little bit of a generation gap, but the music was always there. It just was just a little more compartmentalized.” Still, he’s gratified to see how the scene has blossomed. “I’m really happy that people like this kind of music, and it’s not as hard to find.”
Welch, too, is struck by how much more visible acoustic folk has become since their early days. She does worry about the ability of artists to make viable careers, due to the Internet-era predicament that she and Rawlings articulated so powerfully back in 2001 with the song “Everything Is Free.” But the music itself, she notes, is strong.
“If we had any part in the resuscitation of the beauty of acoustic music, that’s just a great honor,” Welch says. “We just do what we do, because these are the sounds we like. I really dig the scene that’s around these days. I feel like there’s a lot of room for people to make music they like. That’s a good thing for the art.”
