The long-awaited new record from Gillian Welch is due out on June 28. Back in our Feb/March 2010 issue we spoke with Welch and her musical partner David Rawlings, following the release of his debut album Friend of a Friend_.

David Rawlings wants to meet at Musso & Frank’s Grill on Sunset Boulevard. Long the haunt of writers and film stars, it’s swanky in that Old Hollywood way – run-down and highbrow at the same time. The venue seems fitting somehow. Rawlings and his longtime musical partner Gillian Welch have cultivated a timeless aesthetic. Their music, made under Welch’s moniker since the mid-‘90s, is old-timey country folk, but its feel is oceanic and transcendent. Onstage, Welch wears long dresses that you might have seen on the prairie in the 1890s and Rawlings wears a vintage suit. He plays an iconic guitar, a dark-finished 1935 Epiphone Olympic. It’s an archtop, with f-holes. It sounds like the 1930s.

The restaurant has a big neon sign, red-jacketed waiters, white tablecloths. The booths are Hollywood reliquaries – timeworn red leather semicircles bound in dark wooden cubbies. In one of them, facing the front door, is Rawlings. He’s wearing jeans and a denim shirt and black cowboy boots. He’s gaunt and has a stubbly, graying beard. He looks incongruous and out of place with the sharply-dressed Angelenos around him.

He looks just like he does on the cover of the new Dave Rawlings Machine record, Friend of a Friend. Going on 15 years, Rawlings has been the relatively unsung guitarist in the duo that is Gillian Welch. The Machine is his turn to step out front. Welch is still right there on every track – writing, singing, playing, in the studio and on tour. It’s not exactly a solo project. It’s more of a change-up, a swapping of roles.

Rawlings orders clams. They remind him of back home in Rhode Island, where he spent his childhood summer nights hunting crayfish and days fishing for bass out of a canoe. It was, he says – except for the video games – “surprisingly Huck Finn.” He’d sit out on the lake with the lyrics to Kenny Rogers and Charlie Rich story-songs running through his head. But he hadn’t taken up guitar yet.

“I played a little saxophone when I was a kid,” he says. “And I didn’t like it that much. I never liked, as it turns out, instruments that made only one note at a time. I’m kind of a harmony guy – I’m interested in notes against notes. I’m not interested in just notes.”

It was much later that he realized he liked to sing harmony. He’d just moved to Nashville and he was sanding the floor of his apartment with a palm sander that was too small. He sang all day in the same key before he realized he’d been harmonizing with the exhaust fan.

A friend asked him to get a guitar, so they could play Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” in a talent show when was 15 or 16. As soon as he sat down with his guitar and his Mel Bay book, he had a light bulb realization. He could actually be good at this.

He consumed classic folk rock records – CSNY, Buffalo Springfield – and at the same time was into alternative and punk, and played in bands inspired by The Pixies. His father had turned him on to Dylan, calling him in one day to play him “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

“I knew I thought that song was kind of cool,” Rawlings says, “but I didn’t know I was going to hear the other stuff on that tape and think it was the greatest stuff I’d ever heard. The other side of this is, I heard Nashville Skyline. I became aware that I liked country music, and then… I realized that I really didn’t want to work jobs anymore.”

He saw an ad in the paper: WORKING COUNTRY BAND NEEDS GUITAR PLAYER. He tried out and the band hired him. At 17, Rawlings was the lead guitar player in Silver Steel, a group of older men, playing country bars throughout New England. And a lot of Emmylou Harris tunes.

He still didn’t fancy himself a professional musician. He spent a year at the University of Richmond as an English major before he realized that he’d already taken every music class that the school had to offer. He was terrified. He knew he’d better go to music school and he enrolled at Berklee, in Boston.

That’s where he met Welch. The two hung with a bluegrass clique of about ten students. Rawlings was a little intimidated by his peers, but he sharpened his chops in the bars. At school, he was the guy that you called to play lead on a Linda Ronstadt or Chuck Berry tune.

He was playing with a high caliber working country band, too, as well as punk and bluegrass bands and school ensembles. It was, he says, “the only way I think I got decent enough to become a professional musician.” He didn’t finish his degree. Instead, one night, after one last gig with John Hicks and Revolution, he got in the car, and – at 2 a.m. – lit out for Music City.

“I just started playing with as many people as I could, all these singer/songwriters and kids who had moved there at the same time – but I was sort of a weird hired gun like I’d been at Berklee. I’d go and learn someone’s six songs and go and play their gig.”

Welch was already in Nashville, playing with a group of other musicians, including some Berklee classmates. Rawlings added hot Telecaster leads to her earliest demos. He thought that the only way for Welch to overcome performance anxiety was to play at as many open mic nights as she could. He felt bad for her, waiting alone for painful hours through singer/songwriter nights to play one song. So he started going along. And when the rules allowed, they played together.

Rawlings and Welch were both “crazy about” brother bands – The Monroe Brothers, The Delmore Brothers, The Blue Sky Boys and others who had gotten big on AM radio in the 1930s – and they would sing those songs as duets. Rawlings didn’t like flat-picked guitar in a big ensemble – he thought that it was overpowered by the banjo, the fiddle and the mandolin.

“If you listen to The Monroe Brothers as a two-piece, or you listen to The Delmore Brothers with a tenor guitar – I knew that the guitar had more of a chance. And I guess that I was always sort of going for that somewhere in my head. I thought that music was supposed to sound like ‘Cortez the Killer.’ It was supposed to go pshhhhhh” – he makes the sound of expanding space – “and have this incredible sense of space and mystery, and that brother team stuff is closer to that.”

They’d found their sound. They started gigging. They decided, consciously, that their musical entity would revolve around Welch. Rawlings was happy to play the sideman role. It was what worked. He talks about Welch’s gifts with a deep respect.

“We got good information that when she was singing, her songs always went over best,” he says. “People believed her when she told her stuff, which was the thing that you can’t teach and the thing that makes you an artist.”

Rawlings pays close attention to what makes people stop and listen, or get up and dance or shout for more. If he hadn’t found music, he’s sure that he would have wound up in advertising. He enjoys using words to shape perception. It figures strongly into how he writes songs – and how he picks them.

The jug punk stomper “It’s Too Easy” may not have made it onto Friend of a Friend if Rawlings (on banjo) and Old Crow Medicine Show fiddler Ketch Secor hadn’t played it one night while out busking for beer money on the streets of Nashville.

“We were basically singing ‘Rocky Top.’ We might have sung ‘Wagon Wheel’ – their song – and ‘It’s Too Easy’ and a bunch of other stuff, but I think that those three songs were the only ones that stopped people or got money. Busking is a wonderful indicator. If you can make somebody stop, or take a dollar out of their pocket, then you’ve got something.”

The Old Crows sing and play all throughout Friend of a Friend, lending it a deep, old-time jug band feel. Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench sits in, as does Bright Eyes organist Nate Walcott and veteran drummer Karl Himmel. Rawlings plays everything but the fiddle. There’s a string section in there, too.

Rawlings and Welch are the core – swapping harmonic places, so that Rawlings sings lead melody, and Welch sings on high. When they perform the song “Method Acting” – Conor Oberst’s reflection on artistic frustration (which slips, effortlessly, into ‘Cortez the Killer’) – it’s reminiscent of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. But the vocal pairing didn’t always work.

“We recognized that, in most cases, it’s helpful for me to have a baritone vocal,” says Rawlings of singing below Welch, rather than forcing her vocals up high. “That was the crazy thing about making this record, that so much of what we’d learned didn’t work. ‘Method Acting’ was the one song on there that worked sort of in the way we would have cut a Gillian record, just with the vocals switched.”

That figures into which songs are on Friend of a Friend, and which ones will wind up on the long-awaited Gillian Welch record. Rawlings half-joking says that it will be “the happiest day of my life” when her record is completed, one that after many false starts is expected this year. When they personalize Oberst’s lyrics, you know what they’re referring to.

So, T-Bone, please keep the tape rolling
Gill, keep strumming that guitar
We need a record of our failures
We must document our love

Some songs, Rawlings says, just didn’t fit Welch’s strengths. The two wrote “Sweet Tooth” with Whispertown 2000 frontman Morgan Nagler. It’s a slightly inadvertent revision of the old “Candyman” tradition. Rawlings wanted to play around with that old country blues pattern. Welch had been meaning to write a song about a sweet tooth – which is, after all, addiction – in this case, to love, sex, drugs, candy. ( “I wanna be your honey, but I got a sweet tooth.” ) The subject and the metaphor keep changing for at least a quadruple entendre. The rhyme scheme keeps shifting, the rhythm of the language speeds up, a tambourine comes in stompin’, and suddenly you’re out there on the street a-buskin’ and a-clappin’. It’s a remarkable track – complex and challenging, lyrically clever and fun.

But the steady-rolling finger-picking style that Welch uses while singing lead didn’t play to that playful, phantasmagoric dynamic. So Rawlings took it. On other songs, they’d work and work without success until Welch sang lead. Those went into her pile of songs to record.

“The only song on there that I feel like we maybe stole a little bit [away] from being a potentially great sounding Gill record, is ‘Bells of Harlem,’” Rawlings says, “which I think she would have crushed. But I figured to take one song for the record is kind of OK.”

It’s a beautiful song, delicate and prettily arranged, like an early ‘60s soul record with on acoustic guitars, with strings and Wurlitzer.

That really seems to be what Rawlings is chasing. He considers himself less of a guitarist than an arranger. He creates some moods on this record. You want to hear these songs with all of the scratches and pops and treble zing of an old 78 record.

This take on old-time music is not a put-on. It’s rooted in a deep knowledge, and a life approach that follows the age-old musician’s tradition. Rawlings surely doesn’t think of himself as a guitar hero but he’s set himself on the folk hero’s journey. He’s cast his fate – as a producer and a partner, as a player and a singer – by championing others. And isn’t the champion the oldest type of musician there is?