Gillian Welch

The final encore at Gillian Welch’s San Francisco show in May was the kind you don’t forget. “I don’t know if this will work, but we’re going to try it,” Welch said dubiously, before she stepped away from the mic and joined partner David Rawlings and guest Peter Rowan at the very edge of the stage. Looking directly at the audience at the Palace of Fine Arts theater, they sang “Long Black Veil” in soaring three-part harmony—with no mics or amplification. The sold-out crowd, which had been whooping and hollering just moments before, was completely silent as the pristine sound carried throughout the theater. It was a telling moment for Welch and Rawlings, who have for some time been on a crusade to de-technologize music and break down the barriers between musician and audience.

The same low-tech directness is at the center of Welch and Rawlings’ latest record, Soul Journey, recorded and produced in just eight weeks and released in June on their own independent label, Acony Records. “This record really could have been called ‘One Week in March,’” Welch says on the phone from her home in Nashville. “It’s about playing music with people you want to play music with.”

Gathering a group of musicians at Nashville’s Woodland Sound Studio—located in historic RCA Studio B where the first Will the Circle Be Unbroken was recorded—Welch presented them with a cluster of new songs and let them loose. Spontaneity was the order of the day. “There was no master plan, the arrangements weren’t mapped out,” Welch says. “We didn’t even go home and listen to playbacks.” Most vocals were recorded in one take while Welch sang live with the band. The point was to get rid of the overproduction that filters so much of what finally makes it onto CD these days. “We wanted this record to be anti-manufactured—it’s almost anti-professional, really.”

It shouldn’t come as any surprise to Welch and Rawlings’ fans to find them in pursuit of a rawer, edgier sound. They’ve been heading in this direction for a while, playing live, clustered around vocal mics like a 1930s-era radio show. And after all, old-fashioned mountain music, one of the duo’s primary inspirations, is in its essence a back porch jam. After spending her formative years digging further and further back into the roots of gospel, bluegrass and old-time country, Welch found herself at the forefront of a trend when the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack surprised the musical world by climbing the charts. Welch, whose three-part harmonies with Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss create the record’s spine-tingling high point, toured the country with the Down from the Mountain revue, which also featured staunch traditionalists like her hero, Ralph Stanley. “Ralph’s the real thing,” Welch says reverently. “Any musician can learn something from listening to Ralph Stanley.”

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings certainly did. After meeting each other at the Berklee School of Music in Boston more than a decade ago, the two, who are both in their early 30s, began a rich musical collaboration that’s succeeded in making traditional music sound completely new again. With the help of O Brother producer T Bone Burnett (Elvis Costello, Counting Crows, Wallflowers, Los Lobos), Welch and Rawlings carved out new territory with their first two records: 1996’s Revival (nominated for a Grammy) and 1998’s Hell Among the Yearlings, with songs that both sounded centuries old and brand new. In 2001 came their first self-produced release on Acony records, Time (The Revelator), which hinted at an edgier, more rock-inflected sound. Songs like the ambitious “April 14th Part 1/Ruination Day Part 2,” in which Welch ruminates on a series of catastrophic events that all took place on the same day, and the mystical 14-minute jam “I Dream a Highway” erased any previous perception that Welch and Rawlings were nothing but a retro act.