When Gillian Welch and her unbilled but inseparable musical partner, David Rawlings, released their fourth studio album, Soul Journey, in 2003, all the indicators pointed to unstoppable momentum for their uniquely rural American sound. Then the music stopped. Guest appearances continued, on record and stage, and Rawlings released a CD under his own name in 2009, but the record to cement the duo’s reputation as the noblest explorers of modern-day traditionalism was nowhere to be heard. Remembering Welch’s profile upgrade via a multimillion-selling bluegrass soundtrack of years before, suddenly it was: o sister, where art thou?
Earlier this year, that stubbornly uncooperative project suddenly coalesced with belated speed into the new album, The Harrow & the Harvest. So, as the couple sit in the lobby of Woodland, the studio they own in Nashville, the mood is of low-key elation and undeniable relief — but, impressively, not of fatigue, given they have driven 2,000 miles back here for the interview from their sometime home in Los Angeles. “Thirty-one hours, however you do it,” Welch says cheerily, before they launch into hours of indefatigable chat.
Having made four albums in seven years, as well as enjoying that cinematic step-up, Welch has known that, since then, the grass has been growing under her feet. “I was well aware of the time that was going by,” she says. “Nobody was more frustrated.” Rawlings adds: “I wish it was a six-year vacation, then we got back to work, but, of course, it wasn't.” Welch goes on: “And it wasn’t like there wasn’t music during that time. There were other projects, and we kept writing songs, we just didn’t... They weren’t worth putting out.”
As with many great partnerships, they take equal shares not just of the art, but of the conversation, jumping in on each other’s sentences as they emphasise how serious the songwriting drought became. “We spent a couple of years at our wits’ end,” Welch says, without melodrama. “We keep getting asked, ‘Were people mad at you, did they want the record?’ The truth is, most people had given up and were starting to doubt if we would ever make a record again. So, no, they weren’t yelling. They had dispensed with yelling. There was this sense of, like, starting over again, because — even though we were still active in the public world — for our own music, it felt like we were nowhere, like we’d just fallen off the map. I know that our songcraft had drifted and was not in peak form, and I chalk that up to probably overtouring after Soul Journey. We did our first sort of global tour — we went to Australia and New Zealand and Europe — and somehow it kind of messed with our heads.
“It was not my wish to take eight years off,” Welch adds. “This is not how I would have had it, and I seriously had to come to terms with that. I’m as sensitive as the next person — in fact, probably more sensitive. We tried to sum that up in the title of the record, too. There definitely were a number of harrowing years building up to this,” she laughs. “But I’m really pleased that, in hindsight, it was all prep.”
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By now, lightning is flashing outside the studio and the rain is crashing against the door. We are sitting in front of a huge picture of another maverick who took on the Nashville establishment, Chet Atkins. Woodland was a silent-movie theatre in the 1920s, then a thriving studio and mastering room in the 1970s.
It was not my wish to take eight years off. This is not how I would have had it, and I seriously had to come to terms with that
As we tour the large building, the duo show me the old balcony and the little room that would have been the projectionist’s lavatory. These days, they rent out the studio only by word of mouth, which is how Robert Plant heard about it — through Buddy Miller, a mutual friend and Nashville cat — and recorded last year’s Band of Joy album there. Primarily, though, this is the playground of the studio’s owners. Welch and Rawlings created much of the new album in this space and, without ever feeling nostalgic, The Harrow & the Harvest is redolent of a more simple, dignified time, in the music industry and in the world. Its beguiling harmonics may also make it their most intertwined work to date. “Soul Journey was not a duettish record at all,” Rawlings agrees.
“All the sweat and toil seemed to go before,” Welch says. “Things were fluid and spontaneous. A bunch of music got composed and changed substantially in the studio. Yet, when you listen, I feel like it sounds pretty relaxed and composed. It was, like, ‘What happens if you play it on banjo?’ Play it on banjo, boom, there’s the take. Hard Times, for instance, is maybe the second take, and that was very common.
“One of the themes in this record is looking back at Tennessee and the South, and what it meant to us the first time we came here. It really is the cradle of our work. There’s a regretfulness about the passage of time, not so much about getting older, but the things you lose — people, relationships, all kinds of things. In Hard Times, there’s the loss of a more agrarian lifestyle, there’s the loss of the mule. All kinds of things go away, and not in ways you would wish. That kept coming up.”
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That’s the kind of otherworldly outlook that makes it tempting to see and hear Welch as an eerie echo. Yet, while heavily informed by the Monroe Brothers, the Carter Family and all the other music she was learning even in her preteens, first in New York, then in Los Angeles, Welch is no revivalist for the sake of it. The Harrow & the Harvest will evoke all the usual epithets — that her work is plaintive, lonesome and reminiscent of things lost — but it stays in tune with today. Colin Meloy, of the Decemberists, with whom Welch sang extensively on their current album, The King Is Dead, exhorts the listener to enjoy it “on an old radio, cradled next to your ear” — but it also fits an iPod just fine.
Both Welch and Rawlings, a native of Rhode Island whom she met as a fellow student at Berklee College of Music, in Boston, had dabbled in rock bands before discovering a shared passion for bluegrass. The couple moved to Nashville in 1992, and it paid off, if at first almost one dollar bill at a time. After auditioning for Jerry Moss and signing to his and Herb Alpert’s post-A&M label, Almo Sounds, the pair caught the ear of T-Bone Burnett, who would go on to produce Welch’s debut album, Revival. By then, Emmylou Harris had already grabbed their song Orphan Girl for herself.
Rawlings connects the young Welch he has subsequently heard with the modern performer. “It’s remarkable to hear a recording her parents made of her when she was eight, singing ‘Here’s to you, my ramblin’ boy’, a Carter Family song, because she’d learnt it with all the other songs by them and Woody Guthrie at her hippie grade [primary] school. Her guitar-playing is not as accomplished, but the feeling is there. It’s the same person.”
By them not losing their nerve while their new album was strangely stuck in their throats, the story has a happy ending. “If somebody had come in on this record and said ‘You gotta put bass and drums on this’, we really would have broken their arm. It’s, like, ‘This is how we like our guitars and voices to sound.’
“We’re not traditional artists,” Welch concludes. “We don’t record traditional folk songs — we’re songwriters. For us, if there aren’t songs, we’re kind of done.”
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The Harrow & the Harvest is out now on Acony/Warner