Photos by Paxton X

Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings have a well-earned reputation for living in the musical past, with the brilliantly backward-looking amalgam of bluegrass, folk and rock that they’ve been propagating since Welch’s debut album Revival in 1996. And no one was more thrilled than these two when the turn of the last millennium came around, though not for particularly futuristic reasons.

“I loved when we came through the aughts again. I loved that we could say ‘oh-something’ again,” says Rawlings.
“There we were again! Oh, ‘The time of the preacher in the year of oh-one,’” chimes in Welch, quoting a famous Willie Nelson song from Red-Headed Stranger.

In the Welch/Rawlings world, everything old eventually becomes new again. “What happened on our way here?” she asks, rhetorically, still wearing the faded blue Grateful Dead shirt that she’s had on for the last three states. “Dave and I drove through a dust storm. It’s still going around!”

Earlier today, the two were driving through Arizona when they ran into a furious storm on the far side of Flagstaff. Since much of Welch’s music is timeless enough that she could have written it during the Depression, this was possibly Woody Guthrie bestowing his dirty blessing from the great beyond. Or maybe it’s just that the force of their musical personality is so strong that occasionally even the surrounding weather is compelled to go retro.

Not really being into planes, but being big on writing in roadside motels, Welch and Rawlings have made the round-trip drive between their bases in Nashville, Tenn. and LA ten times in the last year.

Tonight, they’ve pulled into town just in time for a late-night interview at a West Hollywood deli. But the real reason for the drive is that, tomorrow, they’ll spend the day at an old printing press near MacArthur Park, where the cover art insert for Welch’s new CD will be manufactured using the tricky, all-but-antiquated letterpress process.

The inserts will be “about as thick as a coaster – as thick as it can be and still slide in a jewel case” according to Welch. “The printing press took delivery on 4,000 pounds of paper yesterday,” she laughs, giddy with anticipation.

This might seem like a folly to almost anyone else, but “there are so many liabilities for running your own record label – this is one of the instances where no one could really tell us not to,” she says. “So, what the hell!”

It might seem like the understatement of the post-aughts to say that there is a whiff of nostalgia around much of the Welch ethos. But no one has been more nostalgic in recent years than Welch’s dedicated fan base – nostalgic, that is, for the days when their heroine was still making records. The Harrow & the Harvest, Welch’s new album, is her first effort in eight years. That’s a hell of a layoff – mitigated only by the fact that her timeless sounds are immune to the “dated” qualities that might afflict any pop artist who played Rip Van Winkle.

So where has she been hiding out? Some alternate dimension, we would hope, where she and the Stanley Brothers are pop stars?

“I wish I could tell you that we had taken a wonderful six-year vacation,” she says.
“Oh yeah, my God, please!” says Rawlings. “Tell the world that! Tell them that we went to every island and backpacked through Alaska.”
“But it is not true,” concedes Welch. “The thing that was most harrowing about it” – her use of the word harrow here, a la the new album’s title, may not be coincidental – “[was as] this whole chunk of time that has gone by, we always thought we were working toward my next record. We really never stepped away from it, as unbelievable as it is to say.”
“Largely at every moment, we were thinking, ‘No, we can’t do that, because we’re working on Gil’s next record,’” says Rawlings. “No fan could have been more frustrated than we were. Truly, deeply frustrated.”

Yet, The Harrow & the Harvest is not a years-in-the-making project. The entire thing was recorded in a five-week period earlier this year at Woodland, the historic studio they own in East Nashville.

Moreover, of all the unreleased songs that concertgoers have heard throughout the last eight years, only one – “The Way It Will Be” – made it to the album. They started another song, “Hard Times,” last summer, but the wrote the remaining eight tracks in a flurry of creativity between October and February. This was one case where Welch suddenly developed an antipathy toward “old” – at least when it came to her own material.

“The new stuff seemed to kind of be hanging together,” Welch says. “And I think I was ready to bid the old stuff good riddance, because it had not really come through for us.”

Anyone suspicious of the expedience with which the new material took shape shouldn’t worry that Welch unfairly shunted her backlog of other unrecorded songs: The Harrow & the Harvest is her best album since 2001’s Time (The Revelator) or maybe even Revival – and it’s certainly her purest, most consistent collection ever.

So what was the hang-up in the years leading up to this? Just your garden-variety creative slump – not that that stops most recording artists who are either in denial or in debt from issuing new products like clockwork.

“There could easily have been two or three records in this span of time,” she allows. "As absolutely frustrating as moments of the last couple years have been, I’m really happy that those records didn’t come out.
“I don’t know why our craftsmanship slipped but it had, and there were problems with our songcraft,” she confides. “And what made it so hard to diagnose and fix was that, still, in all of these flawed songs, there were always things that were very enticing – little ideas. But for some reason, we had fallen off the good work. It’s very common. It happens for a lot of people. I don’t know exactly.”

Well, yes, she does – sort of. If nearly every great recording artist goes into at least a slight decline after their first decade of prodigiousness, then it’s only natural.

“I think for most people when they are writing when they’re younger – there is in some cases a huge element of freshness and just instinct that carries them on,” says Rawlings. They look at something they love and emulate it without even realizing what parts of the form or functionality of what they’re copying. There is something harder about when you figure out how to do it later on and you’re not getting any help from your own foolishness. It’s no longer the first time you ever played horseshoes, where you throw three ringers in a row before you realize that that’s hard. There’s no longer beginner’s luck."

And Welch points out: “I mean, ‘Orphan Girl’ [the lead track from her debut album] is a wacky example from my catalog. I remember why that happened: I thought, ‘Oh, I want to write a song that Ralph Stanley might recall.’”

And out of that whim of a self-assignment a template, really, for the rest of Welch’s entire career was born.

“There’s a great story that I’ve heard,” says Rawlings. “The folk scare started happening and Merle Travis’ manager tells him that he ought to write some folk songs and record them, because they’re selling well. And Merle Travis says to his manager, ‘Well, you don’t just write folk songs. Folk songs are just something that exist.’ And his manager says, ‘Well, why don’t you try ?’”

Welch and Rawlings both crack up at this. Sure enough, in the retelling, Travis, “who was not a coal miner but a songwriter, working out in California, sits down and within two or three days writes ‘Dark as a Dungeon’ and ‘Sixteen Tons’ and this whole thing that becomes the wonderful Merle Travis Folk Songs of the Hills folio of 78s,” they say.

For them, the Merle Travis anecdote speaks to the unbeatable combination of sheer effort and sheer naïveté – and also eternal questions of authenticity.

Prior to penning “Orphan Girl” in the mid-‘90s, “I feel like I had kind of been working toward it,” Welch says. “I definitely loved and admired folk and bluegrass songs.”

But, as Rawlings points out, “What was happening in the climate immediately before that was that some female writer-artists like Kathy Mattea or Mary Chapin Carpenter were having a good amount of success in Nashville, and when [Gillian] got her publishing deal, they were looking for someone cut from that cloth.”

Instead, she converted to pre-country music. “I have a lifelong respect for folk music, and all the peculiarities and the poetry that are in it,” she says. “Because it moves me so much, I hope I’ll write a song as good as ‘Barbara Allen’ someday. I get some criticism for working in this form. You know, part of that – I think – is that there aren’t that many people even trying to do this and so I kind of stand out there as this fool on the hill. Actually, as Merle Travis said, ‘You can’t write folk songs!’ But we actually try,” she laughs. “I don’t think we’ve done as good a job as Merle but we do try.”

Welch and Rawlings have long been a duo both personally and professionally, but those initial Music Row handlers assured them that “Your act is Gillian Welch.”

Plus, putting both their full names on anything mandated a tiny typeface, and just “Welch & Rawlings” sounded “kind of square,” as she puts it. “We should have come up with a band name, but we say we’re the band called Gillian Welch. We’re really a band in the same way that Bright Eyes is a band between Conor [Oberst] and [Mike] Mogis.”

Rawlings officially produces the albums, co-writes all of the material, sings constant harmony, plays a mean acoustic guitar (and most other stringed instruments) – and finally got his name in lights when a well-received Dave Rawlings Machine album came out in 2009.

Welch’s eternal-sounding voice is clearly the star of the show, though, all democracy aside. Her first two albums were produced by T Bone Burnett, distributed by Geffen and beloved by pretty much anyone with the slightest inclination toward low-key roots music.

“[On] The first couple records, you can really hear the influence of the Stanley Brothers and the Monroe Brothers – all the brother team stuff and bluegrass stuff that we were filtering through our little duet – mixed with Townes Van Zandt or Steve Earle or Tim O’Brien, the songwriters we were hanging around with in Nashville when we moved there,” she says.

But the switch to their own label, Acony, wasn’t the only change to come with record three. “On Time (The Revelator), they’re really little acoustic rock songs in that I hear Neil Young more in them,” she says. (They’ll be opening up for Young – and friends – on the Buffalo Reunion tour this summer.)

The fourth and most recent album, 2004’s Soul Journey, was more of an experiment – even a Welch “solo album,” by their standards, despite Rawlings’ full participation. “With that, we stepped away from our duet thing for a while, because it was so constricted and microcosmic. Part of the record was solo and part was (full) band” – i.e., the great drums scare of the early aughts, most notably on the album’s closing number “Wrecking Ball.”

“The Way It Will Be” is the one pre-2010 song on the new album, “written in the last writing burst before Soul Journey” eight-plus years ago," says Welch. "The funny thing is it was so obvious that it had no place on Soul Journey, that it was this other thing – so we were like, ‘Oh, that’s for the next one.’ Which it was – just not eight months later, like we assumed.
“That song has been around and frustrating people for so long,” she says. “It even has its own website, where you have to petition this guy who swears he’s listened to every recorded live version and has picked out the best one, and if you write an essay, he’ll send it to you.”

The Harrow & the Harvest is back to being percussion-free (unless you count the apocalyptic gospel song “Six White Horses,” on which Welch slaps her thighs). It’s free of anything but the two of them, in fact. “The credits for this record are a quick read, truly,” Welch says.

Where does it fit with the others, influence-wise? A mixture, maybe.

You might hear some Ralph Stanley in the opening “Scarlet Town” and some CSNY in “The Way It Will Be.” But ultimately, Welch says, “This is the first one where I hear the main influence being our own work. We’ve played this way long enough that we’re at least a couple of layers in – like, more fully metabolized than ever before. This is how we sound when we sit and play guitars.”

Embracing the idea that they’re their own finest influence at this point may have been key in recapturing their lost mojo. As for the impact of those less productive years, you’ll hear that reflected in some of the songs obliquely – as any and all autobiographical musings are always disguised as character sketches.

“There was no way that the struggle to write these songs and to make this record wasn’t going to turn up in the lyrical material,” says Rawlings, pointing to seemingly unrelated songs like “Hard Times.” “But thankfully – or at least hopefully – that thread of struggle and dissatisfaction and frustration is a common enough thing that it will illuminate parts of other people’s lives and minds when they listen.”
“Oh, yeah. Everyone has to deal with things not going the way they would have them. You might have wanted a refill on your Diet Coke!” Welch cracks, noting the long absence of the waitress as the midnight hour passes. “But you didn’t get one, so you have to deal with that! Anyway, I think it’s a pretty adult record, in that regard. I feel some sort of maturity. I don’t feel like we’re throwing tantrums on it.”

Sorrowful tantrums, if anything. “At one point, Dave said these songs are ten different kinds of sad. It’s true in a way,” she says, pointing to themes of “change and loss and the passage of time.”

Maybe the melancholia-celebrating new song “Dark Turn of Mind” is actually a sort of rallying cry, then? “Yeah, we sell records where it’s cloudy – globally,” she says.

Welch shoos Rawling’s hand away as he tries to sneak a bite of her carrot cake. “I kind of take our cloudiness for granted, but we sent all the lyrics to the artist who illustrated the cover, who mostly does art for hardcore heavy metal bands – skulls and decomposing catfish and gnarly stuff. We had our first conversation to talk about what he was gonna do, and he’s like, ‘Man, these lyrics are fuckin’ dark. ’”

Yes, they are – and also a source of great delight, if you’re at all interested in the great mysteries of classic Southern poetry or how it’s possible to skirt the line between archaic and contemporary language in the service of cutting a song loose from a sense of time that’s too specific.

Welch expresses surprise – surprisingly – that anyone would imagine any of her mega-traditionalist songs actually take place in the past. “I can’t tell sometimes if people think the stuff is set in another time because of the sounds we make or because of what we’re talking about,” she says. “If we were singing the same song and there were electric guitars, would they have the same hang-up with not knowing if it’s contemporary? Because in my mind, all the things are happening now. If I talk about a pistol, that’s usually a stand-in for some other thing – a metaphor.”

She brings up “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor,” the traditional folk song she rearranged for Soul Journey. “How many times have you had a friend come over to your house and be like ‘Man, can I just crash here tonight? Have you got a blanket?’ ‘Of course you can.’ What did you do? You just made your friend a pallet on your floor, if you didn’t have an extra bed. I have no problem interpreting ‘Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor’ as ‘Dude, can I crash here tonight?’ Apparently some people do,” she laughs. “But I’m so steeped in it, that’s just the language I use.”

You will also hear references to “swells” on the new album. In “Hard Times,” a man who’s lost his farm is seen walking to the “superette” store – again, for her, this takes place in the present. “We are using the word ‘superette’ in a 2011 context. If it was 1955 and we were writing the song, it might be modern; but in this case, you are using the fact that it is a slightly archaic word to grab color. It’s not a synonym for supermarket or quick stop or 7-11, but to conjure something that is older, from the ‘60s. It’s a sad word – to me, in this day and age – suggesting something that is slightly failed. It says things about poverty.”

I admit to them that I sometimes find myself about to use certain out-of-date words in conversation like “rounders,” a term that I surely picked up after she and T Bone Burnett both used it songs – but I censor myself, fearing that people would think this was an affectation.

Welch is aghast at my self-censorship confession. "But that whole tradition of American folk language – don’t you want to keep it alive? Why would you let the word ‘rounder’ fall out of use if you could use it? Plus, it’s got my favorite vowel sound in the world. If you don’t use them, they won’t work anymore.

“We were taking a friend home the other day and I said, ‘Should I turn here or should I just get on the highway?’ She looked at me and she said, ‘Highway? Who calls it the highway?’ This is another one of the most beautiful words in our language. Are you not gonna use the word highway? "
“Yeah,” says Rawlings, “I mean, thank goodness the word motherfucker is in such common usage.”
“Yeah, that’s a beautiful word, too,” Welch agrees sincerely. Somewhere, I suspect, Bill Monroe is scowling – but only for a second.