For 30 years now, Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings have been making music together. Their country-folk songs, delivered in beautiful two-part harmony and often featuring Rawlings' intricate guitar work, are steeped with a century's worth of American tradition. But the songwriters also chronicle contemporary uncertainty with a gimlet eye: "Everything Is Free" remains the best song ever made about forging a music career in the internet era, and their "Hard Times" speaks to every American who's battling it out with 21st-century economic trouble, even as it embraces the spirit and language of the Great Depression to beautiful effect.
Welch and Rawlings' new album, Woodland, is a little more lush than many of its predecessors, featuring strings and steel guitar alongside the pair's usual two-guitar setup. But like all their albums, it remains a testament to the power of two people who deeply love making music together. I called to ask them about their many years in Nashville and the new record.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Dan Kois: Tell me about Woodland Studios, where you write and record in Nashville. How did you two end up owning that space? David Rawlings: We had worked at Woodland first in the mid-'90s on the first record that we made.
It was one of the first recording studios I think we ever worked in. Gillian Welch: And then strangely, we were on one of the sessions that was probably the last sessions that happened before it closed down, which was a Ryan Adams record called Heartbreaker. Where you guys get in an argument about Morrissey.
Rawlings: [Laughs.] Welch: Yes, exactly. Advertisement Rawlings: Woodland was damaged in the tornado that came through in—I guess that was '98.
And that set off a dispute between the gentleman who was running the recording studios and the guy who owned the building over the insurance for the tornado or whatever, who knows. The guy who owned the building put the building up..
. Dan Kois.
