Gillian Welch didn’t realise how bad the damage was at first, because it was so dark. In early March 2020, in the immediate aftermath of a freak tornado ripping through their studio in Nashville – the historic Woodland Sound, which she and her partner, David Rawlings, had saved from demolition in 2001 – it was hard to tell much of anything, other than the fact that it was somehow still standing.
“As opposed to the building across the street, which was rubble – like, scraped to the ground,” the country-music star says from her home in the city. “But, of course, what had happened was that it had torn the roof off, so we didn’t realise until water started coming in when it started raining.” She sighs softly.
“It was sort of like a nightmare at first, because you’re running around in the pitch black, trying to figure out how bad it is – and it just kept getting worse, because the water was working its way down through the ceilings. And after five, six hours of steady rain, all the ceilings started to collapse.”
Despite the devastation, Welch and Rawlings somehow managed to save almost everything in the studio, from instruments and equipment to master tapes. Rawlings, speaking later from the partially rebuilt studio, says that, four years on, the reconstruction is still in progress.
“I’ve rebuilt the parts that we needed to work, but it’ll probably be a number more years before we get it to the point where I can say, ‘Yes, everything is right as rain,’” he says, laughing. “And there are many parts you could walk into here where you could say, ‘Wow, this looks like it was hit by a tornado.’”
Welch and Rawlings have been making music together as far back as their 1996 album, Revival, although most of their releases have been billed solely as Welch’s work. (Rawlings has released several solo albums as Dave Rawlings Machine, albeit also with Welch’s input.) During the Covid-19 pandemic they released a covers album, All the Good Times (Are Past and Gone), but Woodland, which has been available to stream since the end of the summer but is now being released on CD and vinyl, is their first collection of original material to bear both their names.
“I think for the hard stop of the entire world that was precipitated for us by the tornado and the pandemic, we couldn’t imagine, after all the time we spent, just the two of us, sitting in the livingroom, working on this music, having to divvy it up and put different labels on it. That just seemed the height of absurdity.” She chuckles. “We work on the songs together, both of us sing, and we just sit there and make music. This just seemed like the best answer, and finally dispensed with the ‘Is it a Gill song? Is it a Dave song?’ It should have always been ‘Gill and Dave’, and that’s just what it is.”
The theme of “resilient optimism”, as Rawlings puts it, is one that befits this superb collection of songs wrestled out of a period that was traumatic on multiple levels. Having recorded all of their work at the studio since they took it over, Welch says it was never an option to up sticks.
Despite the sombre backstory to the album, Woodland features hope and optimism amid the melancholia. There is humour, too, although some of it is born of sadness
“What’s more important than the tornado – and the pandemic that hit a week later – was our response to those disasters,” she says. “Really, Woodland the album is our response to those events. And I haven’t really spoken about this enough, but the community outpouring, and the help from strangers, was incredible here in Nashville, particularly in that first week before Covid was any kind of a concern.
“Total strangers would just come by and drop cases of water on the front step, and people brought batteries and fans over to help dry everything out as fast as possible. And I never wrote a proper thank-you letter to all of Nashville for coming to our aid. I probably still should,” she says. “Or maybe, it being a music town and all, they can consider this album as our giant thank-you note.”
Despite the sombre backstory to the album, Woodland features hope and optimism amid the melancholia. There is humour, too, although some of it is born of sadness. The song Hashtag, which is sung by Rawlings and inspired by the fact that they found out about the death of their friend and mentor Guy Clark on social media, includes the wry line, “You laughed and said the news would be bad / If I ever saw your name with a hashtag / Singers like you and I are only news when we die.”
Welch nods. “I’m glad that you hear that, because I think that is true to us,” she says. “We’re standing there, in the mess of a tornado, and we’re already starting to clean up and pick up; there was no question of anything else. And I’m not even sure that at the beginning of making music I was aware how much this faith in humanity runs through our work, this sort of optimism in the human spirit. There’s a tremendous sense of loss on this album and, at the same time, a perseverance.”
Rawlings has always been a prodigiously gifted guitarist, but his playing on Woodland is especially remarkable, not least on the track The Bells and the Birds, which opens with a delicate ethereal chiming that sounds halfway between a harpsichord and a piano.
“I really wanted to have something that felt both like bells and birds, in the way that some of the old classical music does,” he says. “I thought that was a fun thing to think about with two guitars, just how dreamy we can make this sound. I recorded it with room mics, so the sounds blended in the air before they hit the microphone first. I think that gives it a pretty feel.” He laughs as he recalls a message from a fellow musician who heard the track. “She texted me and said, ‘What instrument are you playing?’ and I said, ‘It’s just guitar, and I’m playing harmonics,’ and she was, like, ‘Okay, you guys are wizards. I’m on to you.”
The music that Welch and Rawlings have made over the years has always had a timeless feel, paying homage to the greats who came before yet never restricted by the genre. So it’s both refreshing and reassuring to know that, 28 years after their first recorded collaboration, and in the midst of an industry increasingly influenced by online trends, TikTok and pop music, they continue to make vital records.
Welch chuckles at the notion of being swayed by fads or crazes, noting that their process is “much more circa 1977 or possibly earlier”. Taylor Swift this ain’t. She does, however, point to their 2001 song Everything Is Free, written in the wake of Napster’s disruption of the music industry, which predated the popularity of the streaming era by a good decade. In that respect they have been ahead of the curve.
“That song has had its own trajectory, and it didn’t get that much attention when we put it out,” Welch says. “I don’t think people understood the full implications of what we were saying. And then you turn around 20 years later and it’s this weird sort of slow-burn anthem of artistic angst, or protest, or something.” She sighs again. “But I can’t worry about the world; it’s hard enough. I pretty much do what I do because I have to; I don’t know how else to exist, really, without doing this. So, no, I’m really not thinking about trends.”
Rawlings vows that it won’t be another 13 years between original albums. In fact, he says, enough material was left over from the recording sessions for Woodland to fill two potential future projects. The problem with being successful musicians, however, is that you need to press pause on such endeavours while you tour the current release. (A live date is on the cards for Ireland next autumn, he says.) They are both aware of the “great gaping expanses” between albums, he says, and never take their audience for granted.
“Before we put out this record we had no idea whether anyone’s going to care about any of it,” he says. “It could’ve come out with a whimper, and people [could have] said, ‘Well, you put out a record 10, 12, 15 years ago, but I’ve moved on.’ So, you know, the fact that anyone wants to turn their lenses back to what we’re doing, and to feel that it does connect with present times – as it does in our world, and our lives ...” He smiles, shrugging. “Well, that’s the best you can hope for.”
The CD and vinyl editions of Woodland are released by Acony Records on Friday, November 15th
