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Woodland, named after Gillian Welch & David Rawlings‘ Nashville studio (restored after being destroyed by a tornado in 2020), is the first album of songs written by the duo in seven years, Welch’s first original material since 2011 (The Harrow and The Harvest – review) and Rawlings’ first since 2017 (Almanack – review/interview). As such, it opens, Welch on lead, with the bluesy shuffling Empty Trainload Of Sky, a disturbing vision (“Was it spirit? Was it solid?”) of promise, tragedy and beauty inspired by a walk during the pandemic and seeing a freight train cross a trestle framed by the sky which sets a recurring theme of emptiness and a sense of a void.
That’s echoed in the loss of direction and permanence that pins the wearily trudging, strings-caressed couplet-swapping What We Had (“All my world is changing/I don’t know where I’m going/Apartments rearranging/The beggar winds are blowing…I used to dream of something unseen/It was something that I thought I wanted so bad/But now I only want/What we had”).
The opening line referencing Lead Belly’s Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie, the circling fingerpicked, banjo-tuned guitar Lawman speaks of hard times (“Poor folk gonna scrap for a piece of bread/And the preacher’s gonna preach from the Bible/Devil’s gonna laugh at what he said”) and injustice (“The big iron gonna rust, everything’s dust to dust/Lawman gonna kill my honey dead”) at the hands of the law in the old school acoustic blues tradition.
The album is not without hope and joy, but, as on The Bells And The Birds with its chiming guitars, it’s couched in ambivalence (“Listen how the bells they ring in the morning/What do they say to you my love?/Some hear a song and some hear a warning…They say we gotta get a move along/Farther down the line/Can’t be wasting our time”), asking, “Are they rejoicing or are they grieving”.
A lengthy ruminative guitar intro leads into the folksy, wearied, drawled five-minute North Country, another song veined with resignation (“I don’t make it up this way too often/The cold is a little bit hard on me/I gotta wait for the season to soften/Before I make the trip from Tennessee/Way up in the north country/I guess it’s just my blood getting thinner/This ain’t easy living no siree”) and loss (“You’ll be back when the cold winds blow but I’ll be gone/Some long dark night you might send me a letter/Full of sleepless devilry/I’ll tell you now we could be together/If you ever get tired of being free”).
Rawlings takes his first lead on Hashtag, a string and pedal steel-laced song with a clear pandemic reference (“The very thing that laid me low/Caught it like a new form of the flu/Chalked it up to our old friend the blues”) written in honour of the late Guy Clark for whom they opened on one of their very first tour (“here I’m sitting ‘round another night/Looking at your boots Jesus Christ/That’s some mighty big ones to try to fill/Never can and never will”). Musing on his passing, it’s veined with a wry humour about the lot of cult artists who work on the fringes of popular awareness (“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”) as they ask “When will we become ourselves”.
The Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor on fiddle, it’s back to Welch for the folksy, fiddle-backed slow stomp rhythm of The Day The Mississippi Died, a lament for the passing of downhome values (“I try to treat my neighbors like I like them to treat me/Even when they got that dog and cut down that tree/I hate that barking dog I miss that old oak every day/But I don’t expect everyone to see the world my way”) in a broken society (“But I do believe we’ve broken what we never knew could break/I’m just so disappointed in me and you/But we can’t even argue so what else can we do… You laughed and said, “Aw honey, now what did you expect?”/Not these tears and nightmare years where madness goes unchecked”). Mention of hell in Kensington is a likely allusion to Philadelphia’s opioid crisis, while with the healing waters of a long-time friend having dried up, the only recourse is to raise a parting glass of whiskey. Even so, they can’t resist some self-deprecating humour as she sings, “I’m thinking that this melody has lasted long enough/The subject’s entertaining but the rhymes are pretty rough”.
Fingerpicked with harmonica, Rawlings brings his nasal Dylan sound to the story of Turf The Gambler (“He was a friend of mine/Crashed upon the pavement by the Beast/We’d been playing poker/Of course and drinking wine/When we heard his soul had been released”), though lines like “We glued him back together/And passed a hat around/Paid to have it stitched above his bed/Embroidered words he’d spoken/Would greet his tired eyes/When he awoke transfixed but not dead” and “now he tells his tale/And shows his scars from here to Hollywood/To waitresses and actresses/And princes who preside/Over everything you thought was gone for good” have a definite shaggy dog whiff.
A bluesy slow waltzer, Rawlings on chorus harmonies, the five-minute Here Stands A Woman has Welch lamenting on the changes ageing brings (“You told me that you loved me/And that would never change/Now I’m looking in the mirror/And I know that I’m to blame/Cause it’s all gone babe, like the song says/Fallen from her curls/Here stands a woman/Where there once was a girl”) with loss and hard times (“The mother and the father/Who kept me in their care/They’re both gone like the ribbons/That I used to wear/But it’s alright Ma things got tight Pa/So I went and pawned the pearls”).
After all the preceding dark clouds, it ends on an upbeat note, albeit musically sparse, summoning traditional old-timey thoughts with the slow banjo-shaped Southern Gothic sounding Howdy Howdy, a keeningly sung ode to their personal and professional partnership through the ups and downs (“We’ve been together since I don’t know when/And the best part’s where one starts and the other ends/You and me are always gonna be howdy howdy/You and me always walk that lonesome valley”) that winds down (“Last time, last rhyme, one more for the road”) with an instrumental play out and mention of bluegrass standard Spider Bit the Baby.
Steeped in timeworn American folk roots but filtered through a contemporary Americana lens, they remain the benchmark for acoustic roots duos, hashtag ‘#consummate brilliance’.
Woodland (23 August, 2024) Acony Records
Pre-Order: https://gillianwelch-davidrawlings.lnk.to/Woodland
