Gillian Welch

Live on stage in San Francisco, they seemed to be playing up the contrasts. Rawlings sported his trademark 1930s-style suit, but his hair is shoulder-length now and flops in his face so much that Welch couldn’t help teasing him about getting a haircut. Welch herself stands eerily outside of time; with her high cheekbones and strong jaw, she could be a Dust Bowl heroine straight out of a Dorothea Lange photograph—but her black leather jacket and tough-girl delivery quickly laid any thoughts of country girl naiveté to rest. Playing acoustic guitars with only the occasional addition of banjo or harmonica, the pair still managed to rock out, making the evening as much a trip to a steaming honky-tonk as a plaintive back porch harmony fest.

Beloved for their between-show banter, which plays off Rawlings’ trademark shyness and silence, Welch and Rawlings come across like quintessential high school nerds made good. Their comments about the songs—particularly the tendency toward dark subject matter like rape and murder—are hilariously deadpan. Introducing “My Morphine” from Hell Among the Yearlings, Welch commented that the song was “top of the pops in England,” adding, “I guess they like drug-addicted yodeling songs over there.” As they have in recent live shows, Welch and Rawlings took a decidedly low-tech approach to recording Soul Journey, with everyone playing through shared mics. “It’s a truer sound because you get the sound of all these instruments blending in the air and there are all these weird overtones,” Welch says. “All the sounds are mingling and affecting each other.” She’s right—in ways both positive and less so. Yes, Soul Journey has an endearing hanging-out-in-the-barn intimacy. But the clarity sometimes suffers to the point that it’s hard to pick out which individual instruments are playing. On the wonderfully rollicking “Wayside Back in Time,” for instance, the fiddle is so far in the background that it sounds tinny—or like it’s not meant to be there at all.

On the up side, Soul Journey has none of the deflective surface polish that prevents any depth on the records of so many singer-songwriters. Listening to it for the first time, you have the distinct feeling that you’re hearing exactly what it sounded like to be present during the recording, something that can’t be said about many records today. “It’s completely unfussy,” says Welch. “There’s nothing fussy about this record. That’s the spirit we were going for.”

That means no post-production fussing either. Most of the vocals on Soul Journey were recorded in one take—and there’s no possibility of using auto-tune to polish them up. “My vocals are not recorded in isolation,” explains Welch earnestly, waiting for me to grasp the significance of this. “That means if you tried to shift the pitch on my vocal, you’d shift the pitch on the guitar, and then you’d be in trouble.”

This kind of collaboration calls for a lot of trust, and the musicians on Soul Journey are a tightly interlaced group. Austin-based Mark Ambrose, whose role Welch describes as “surrogate guitar player,” has been a friend for years. (Rawlings produced Ambrose’s most recent solo album.) Welch and Rawlings have known bassist Jim Boquist since 1996, when they opened for Son Volt. “We always told him if we ever needed a bass player we’d call him.” Fiddle player Ketcham Secor plays with Old Crow Medicine Show, for whom Rawlings is currently producing a record. And Dobro player Greg Leisz was featured on Revival and has stayed in touch with Welch and Rawlings ever since. Asked about the album’s cryptic liner notes crediting Welch and Rawlings with “all else,” Welch is apologetic but firm. “It was a completely collaborative process,” she says. “We really don’t want to try to separate out who did what.” She does let on, though, that both she and Rawlings played drums, and that it’s Rawlings playing the banjo, not her.