When I was growing up, the Sunday comics section of the local newspaper included a visual illusion similar to a Magic Eye. It looked like a circle made up of other, smaller, multicolored circles. The trick was that if you held the page close to your face and then pulled the page slowly away from you, an image would emerge with unshakable clarity: a cat curled up on a table, pushing through blots of orange and blue; a lush farm landscape, jutting up from small dots of green and red.
Even if I looked away briefly and then looked back, the image would remain. As a child, I was fascinated by this mechanism, and I remain fascinated by it in a larger sense—the idea that something or someone can ignite our looking in a way that makes the seemingly quotidian come newly alive. The songs of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings do this for me.
For more than two decades and in the course of seven studio albums, the duo has written music that zooms in closely on a scene, a moment, a life, and then slowly pull the lens back, revealing a new vision, new coloring in a landscape, some specificity that adds narrative propulsion. “Woodland” is only the second album, after “All the Good Times,” from 2020, to be credited to both Welch and Rawlings. But the pair’s collaboration dates back to Welch’s 1996 début, “Revival”; Rawlings has played guitar and bass, added vocals, and co-written songs on all of Welch’s albums since.
Welch’s musical and writing bona fides were developed .