Facebook X Email Print Save Story Since 1996, when Gillian Welch and her partner, the guitarist David Rawlings, released “Revival,” their début album, they’ve been making tense and eerie acoustic music about desire and devastation, the sacred and the profane, by and by, Lord, by and by . The duo’s music—some of the first to be dubbed “Americana”—often feels both ancient and instinctive, as though these songs have always existed, oozing out of a phonograph horn on some distant astral plane. These days, it seems preposterous that Welch’s provenance—she was adopted and brought up in Los Angeles—was once controversial within the roots-music scene.
Though it was honed in the American South, the vernacular music that she and Rawlings pull from is inclusive and yielding by design; to be proprietary about this sort of folk music is to misunderstand its ethos entirely. These songs obliterate notions of time and place, focussing, instead, on the threads of joy and sorrow that make us human. This month, Welch and Rawlings will release “Woodland,” their seventh collaboration.
The record was shaped, in part, by the fallout of a catastrophic tornado that whipped through Nashville in the early-morning hours of March 3, 2020. I recently spoke with Welch and Rawlings from their home on the east side of the city. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, I found them thoughtful, open, and prone to finishing each other’s sentences.
“Before we .