On a summer evening several years ago, when the pandemic was still curtailing social lives, Gillian Welch went for a solo walk in East Nashville, the landscape a riot of seasonal green. She watched a train cross a trestle, framed by the blue horizon. “An empty trainload of sky,” she thought.
Back at home, sun still shining, she sat with partner David Rawlings in their living room and told him about the phrase, so evocative of that moment’s tangle of promise, tragedy, and beauty. It was the whole world within a line. For a spell, it was also the title of the pair’s first album of original songs since Welch’s The Harrow & The Harvest in 2011 and Rawlings’ Poor David’s Almanack in 2017. “That somehow was at the core of it,” Welch says in late July, days before the pair’s headlining appearance at the Newport Folk Festival.
But rather late in the years-long process of writing and refining, Welch and Rawlings – the first couple of modern American folk music, whose uncanny harmonies and idiosyncratic arrangements have long suggested some unearthed lacunae within Harry Smith’s archive – pivoted. It’s now called Woodland, a 10-track set on their Acony Records.
In early March 2020, tornadoes swept into Nashville, ripping the roof from their Woodland Studios with them and tour manager and archivist Glen Chausse locked inside. As each section peeled away, the trio moved boxes of master tapes and recording gear by the glow of a single flashlight and two iPhones, shielding their creative lives from five hours of unrelenting rain. “That was the longest night,” Welch remembers. “It’d be hard for me to describe what it felt like when the sun finally came – an absolutely fundamental, primal experience. The sun, man: it’s no joke.”
In the four years since, Rawlings and Welch have worked more than ever in Woodland, not only repairing the space but methodically sorting through perhaps 100 songs, Welch estimates. Woodland was their place of resolve. For a while, they planned to release two records, partly inspired by Bright Eyes’ simultaneous acoustic and electronic albums in 2005. One would perhaps be intimate duets, while the other would include cuts with an intuitive rhythm section and pedal steel veteran Russ Pahl. But as Rawlings sketched out potential tracklists, he saw a cohesive way through the mass, one where despair and hope, loss and redemption, linger in the same small space.
“You don’t miss your water ’til the well runs dry. There are things in life you take for granted, things in life you don’t think will be destroyed,” says Welch. “But by the same token, there are contradictions, complications. There is a renewal, but with stories and scars. I feel like a new shoot, tender and new.”
Woodland hinges on Hashtag, a staggering tribute to Guy Clark. The incisive songwriter was the duo’s ardent early champion, memorising their songs before they’d released an album. Rawlings admired how Clark respected his own craft, once waving off an extra encore because he’d done his is a best work for the night. That lesson holds for Welch and Rawlings, who will shape a record for as long as it takes to be right. “I wish it wasn’t this way. I love it when my favourite bands put out new music,” says Rawlings, laughing. “It’s just how we move.”
Woodlands is out August 23 on Acony Records.
Tracklist:
Empty Trainload Of Sky
What We Had
Lawman
The Bells And The Birds
North Country
Hashtag
The Day The Mississippi Died
Turf The Gambler
Here Stands A Woman
Howdy Howdy
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