These legends of American folk have been struck by fate and are coming our way

It’s almost sunset in Nashville, and Gillian Welch is almost in the zone. “Some of my best work,” she says, “happens when I’m home alone, on the couch, and the light starts to come down, and I start thinking, ‘Oh, what do I have to show for my day?’ And then a switch flips in my brain and I start writing.

“Dave, he works very differently,” she says of her partner David Rawlings, who is currently back to working 15-hour days at their nearby studio, Woodland. “Some of his best work is probably done while he’s brushing his teeth. I’m not kidding,” she insists with a laugh.

The stay-at-home arrangement has clearly paid off in recent years, as the first modern American folk band has survived their longest stint off the road in three decades. Their new album, Bunchwhich will see them return to Melbourne and Sydney in January, was born out of the double whammy of COVID isolation and a 2020 tornado that half-demolished the eponymous studio building, leading to years of rebuilding and inventory.

“Since the tornado, even though we haven’t really been out in the world, we’ve kind of gone into high gear,” Welch says. “We’ve just been writing, recording, and putting out bootlegs from the archives, and Dave has been designing gear and new circuitry and rebuilding the studio …

“We’ve been thinking this was a double for a while, so we’ve got the lion’s share of another record almost ready to release. Maybe it’s just the fact of destruction and the realization of mortality, I don’t know. But… we’ve just been quiet dynamos here.”

It’s worth pausing to consider the “we.” Despite Welch’s prominence among the Americana genre’s leading lights, Rawlings’ presence as a co-writer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist has been a given since her 1996 debut, Revival.

He was there behind her, and Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris, as the O brother, where are you? soundtrack smuggled old American folk into the global mainstream in 2000. She also writes and performs with his band, Dave Rawlings Machine. But it wasn’t until their pandemic album of folk covers, All the good timesthat they shared an equal bill.

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“After the tornado and then the pandemic hit and large parts of the world were in lockdown for months… our world, which is normally quite small, Real “We were small,” Welch says. “All David and I did was sit in the living room and play old folk songs, trying to keep our sanity.

“It was horrible. You know, with our studio in ruins and our neighborhood looking like a bombed-out war zone with no power… it was like living in a post-apocalyptic disaster nightmare.

“For me, there was no way to dissect these last few years and say, ‘Well, whose next album is this?’ … That all felt like a fabrication. We just wanted to put out a record that was the most truthful to that time period.”

When Rawlings calls from Woodland—new roof, main room gutted and rebuilt “but a lot of parts still look like they’ve been through a tornado”—he’s working on the pressings for the album’s vinyl release. And he’s still unpacking how the 10 songs about trains and birds, gamblers, lawmen and troubadours, looking back and growing older have come together so seamlessly.

“To me it all seems steeped in a certain kind of loss,” he says. “And there’s a kind of duality in some of the lyrics, like The bells and the birds: ‘Some hear a song and some hear a warning’, or in Empty trainload of air” – in which a unique, haunting image sends our narrator into a spiral of confusion as to whether she is witnessing a sign from “the Devil or the Lord.”

“It’s like you have this experience, you take in this sensory event, and then you have to ask yourself what it means to you, emotionally and spiritually. I don’t think we realized how much the routine of just working on this project; not traveling and doing nothing, but just trying, day after day, to get back on our feet, how much that was in our psyche, and in the way the music sounds.”

hashtag is another that speaks to the pair’s closely intertwined experience. Years ago, during one of her sunset flashes of inspiration, Welch sang into her iPhone about a life-affirming encounter with a fellow singer. Much later, Rawlings sang it back with the killer chorus that eluded her, leading to a second half about the friend’s recent passing.

“It’s really about loss, and how important mentors and musicians and community are to each other,” he says. “When you’re playing music, it’s really important that other people who are doing it hear you and appreciate you; really understand the physical side of what it is to commit to it, to write the best songs you can, to give the best performance you can on tour, where you might not feel as appreciated as you could every night.

“That’s what keeps a lot of people going: the feeling that you’re not alone,” he says, and in doing so he casually touches on the most fundamental gift a song can give. In their almost uncanny mix of matching vocal qualities and tightly woven acoustic guitar stylings, that empathetic quality has always felt baked into Welch and Rawlings’ work.

“A lot of people talk about my guitar playing,” Rawlings says, “but what’s really happening is there’s two people playing guitar and that sound is created. I think I’m the second best guitarist in our band because the nuance that Gill has with rhythm guitar, the way she separates the bass and the way she creates space, is actually rarer than what I do.

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“When Gill and I play together, we want the guitars to be a complete, whole landscape. I mean, if it just sounds like two guitars, I’m not interested. We just keep trying things until it fits into this picture. Maybe that’s synesthesia, I don’t know, but I can see it and I know when we have it.”

Welch speaks of their voices in similar terms: an unusual blend of female alto and male tenor that are nearly identical in range and timbre when played together. They first discovered this when they came to Nashville from Berklee College of Music in Boston in the summer of ’92.

“There was that night, we were the only two people in the house, and we were sitting in his kitchen and we were singing Long black veiland we stopped after that and we both said we thought we had a nice, natural mix,” Welch says with a funny understatement. Since then, they’ve been out together, on their own time, driving their own cars.

“Dave and I are very headstrong, independent and free spirited. We quickly found out that we couldn’t stand living our lives with someone who says, ‘Lobby call at 9:15.’
“So yeah, we drive ourselves. And we never have conversations about what time we’re leaving. I mean, granted, every now and then you get a snowstorm… but we don’t miss any shows. And we’re never late.”

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings play the Sydney Opera House on January 24 and 25 and Melbourne’s Hamer Hall on January 28, 29 and 30. Tickets go on sale September 12 via lovepolice.com.au.