Gillian Welch & David Rawlings: Just the Two of Us

Welch and Rawlings worked on some of the Woodland songs for a long time, and “Lawman” alone is almost two decades old and looked completely different 15 years ago. “It’s fun to return to things like that later, and all that remains—all you can remember—are the parts, the best parts, and everything else that you worked on falls away,” Rawlings notes. He and Welch try to accelerate that process now by letting themselves zero in on what works and what doesn’t. “You get it done and you’re like, ‘Okay, this is it!’” he continues. “And then, two nights later, you’re like, ‘Gosh, it’s not right yet.’ You like it for 24 hours and then you get another way and you might like it for 48 hours. And then you get another way and you like it for six hours. Then, all of a sudden, you realize you can see what the best of it is and you make some changes and it just locks into a place.”

Rawlings doesn’t believe that the hunger and romanticism he and Welch feel about the unknown in their songwriting will ever dissipate, because it’s “the most challenging and most interesting thing that you can do.” When they wrote the almost-15-minute “I Dream a Highway” together more than 20 years ago, it came from Rawlings playing a then-unnoteworthy melody and Welch turning it into the “Oh, I dream a highway back to you, love” refrain. And then, a few years later, Welch was playing in a different room while she and Rawlings were plucking away at some other song together. That’s when she started singing something new that caught Rawlings’s ear.

“99 songs out of 100 don’t go anywhere,” he says, “but I was like, ‘What was the catchy thing I heard you saying?’ And she was like, ‘What?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know, you’re saying something and it sounded really, really good.’ And she was like, ‘Oh, this?’” What Welch was saying was “Oh me, oh my oh, look at Miss Ohio.” “It’s interesting how, a lot of times, the things that end up being really enduring almost seem too obvious, or something,” Rawlings adds, snickering into a gut-busting laugh. It’s contagious, hearing exactly how he and Welch operate through this language of their own.

And while a lyric like “All my world is changing, I don’t know where I’m going” may sound uncertain when it welcomes “What We Had” into focus, Welch and Rawlings would never let us off that easily. Instead, it’s a very Hemingway-like perspective on a conversation, as if the duo are reflecting on their own shared and separate humanity mid-song—two 50-something-year-olds debating over whether it’s a train or a sky lingering ahead of them. Does it make for a full cup or an empty cup? “It depends on how you’re feeling, or the answer is really both,” Welch says.

Welch moves through the world as an artist, and it’s how she comes to better understand herself and the world and life and the people around and beyond her. “And I don’t always say the things I’m thinking,” she continues. “In fact, quite often, I don’t, which is one of the reasons I have to be a writer—because these things have to come out somehow. Of course, Dave and I do converse about the catastrophe around us and persevering and all of it and keeping creating and what we still want to do. Some of these almost conflicting feelings, they’re very present in this album. There is weariness. There is perseverance. There is joy and sadness.”

What feels memorable about Woodland is that Welch and Rawlings sing through intuition, not catharsis. These tales don’t all have the endings we want them to; “When will we become ourselves?” is the line that ends “Hashtag” and it’s a rhetorical question, because there is something about resolution that feels faraway on an album like this, and sometimes that is because life itself is often not resolute. And yet, to exist is to demand an ending—to demand closure—but Woodland closes the door without ever turning the lock. “Songs don’t just end,” Welch says. “They do have to have endings, but they don’t have to have a bow on top. But they do have to end. As far as we’re concerned, as songwriters, they have to have an ending. We often say, ‘So what?’ When you get to the third verse, so what? I’ve put in this time with you, as a listener, and what? What do I get before the period comes? And, sometimes, with us, I’m starting to suspect that the ‘so what’ is just ‘so you keep going.’”

From Revival on, there has been a very non-overt but oft-present stoicism in Welch and Rawlings’s lyrics. As dark as some of those moments are—death of a child, damnation, addiction, heartbreak—none of the duo’s characters give up. They, as Welch would argue, just keep going. “Now, sitting here at this juncture, I’m able to say, ‘Oh, that is kind of personally true,’” she continues. “If you asked me, ‘Is that song about you?,’ I’d probably say, ‘Well, it’s not not about me, right?’—because, here we are. We haven’t given up. Yeah, the characters might have different names, but the stories are familiar.”

Too, Welch says that the “howdy howdy” phrase that encompasses the final song on Woodland is derived from a gospel, that’s it’s a “spiritual vernacular.” She and Rawlings are no stranger to traditional music, whether it’s playing arrangements straight out of hymn books or tinkering with old Carter Family material. Even a song like “Here Stands a Woman” alludes to Woody Guthrie’s “Danville Girl.” It’s the kind of stuff that transports Welch and Rawlings to their earliest days together, when they were both fascinated by music made by “brother teams” like the Delmore and Monroe Brothers or the Blue Sky Boys.

“They tended to play as duets with one lead-ish instruments, like a tenor guitar and a rhythm guitar, and sing in close harmony and arrange songs that way,” Rawlings notes. “A lot of it was economic, because you’d find a local radio station and you’d play on it in the morning before the farmers went out to work. You’re playing on the air at 4:30 or 5 AM. You’d do a little set and then you’d maybe do another one in the afternoon. You’d do personal appearances within the range of that station and hope people would come to your shows. It was a pretty hard-scrabble way for musicians to make a living, but that’s what a lot of world musicians did.”

Those “brother teams” believed that making a complete sound with just two instruments and two voices while performing gospel songs or up-tempo, sentimental numbers or love ballads was a necessity. It was often a matter of covering a broad range of sounds in a very minimalist setting, happening throughout the Depression and long after World War II as bluegrass and string bands were becoming larger and far more present. “We looked at some of that music, which is really beautiful, and thought we would sing it ourselves,” Rawlings says. He and Welch once went to a pickin’ party in North Carolina and, in a song-circle, started playing a few Blue Sky Boys compositions.

“Some of the folks came up and said, ‘Oh, my God, it’s been so long since I heard anyone sing my uncle’s songs. You do such a beautiful job,’ and we thought, ‘Wow, these are people who are related to the folks who made these records that we love and they approve of what we’re doing and they think we do it well.’ It felt like, to me, a medium that hadn’t really been taken as far as it could go, because it was just a handful of years before music changed. We were inspired by that, to try to create as much as we could and complete pictures with just two instruments.” On Woodland, Welch and Rawlings wanted to conjure that same idea, to create a complete picture with only themselves. Songs like “Lawman” and “The Bells and the Birds”—songs done live with two instruments—especially subscribe to the desire to, musically, have as much in them, even in a microcosmic way, than the songs that are more arranged, like “What We Had” and “Hashtag.”

Woodland, because of its dense, lush instrumentation and its inclusion of electric bass, pedal steel and drums, feels like Welch and Rawlings have “finally shaken the last dusty cobwebs” off of the question “Are these things happening in the present day?” “To me,” Welch says, “they were never ‘back in time,’ because they were just human stories. I don’t really think the human condition has changed that much. The really big struggles, they’re timeless.” She pauses for a moment. “Or, maybe what we were writing about was more obvious, because we tipped people off by letting them know that ‘Hashtag’ was about Guy Clark.”

The initial concept for “Hashtag” came to Welch when she saw “#GuyClark” on her phone and knew what it meant. “It used to be that, sometimes, you would hear a musician you loved on the radio and think, ‘Why are they playing this person on the radio?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, God,’ you know?” Rawlings says. “There was something about that moment and the moment of, later, going to his memorial with all these wonderful Nashville musicians and friends. He was such an indelible part of our early lives as artists and of this town and of the musical community. That song felt like it was something worth reflecting on—this community and how important these artists can be to other artists and how much we learned from them.”

While Welch and Rawlings spent a lot of time with Clark over the years and had great conversations they can still look back on, “Hashtag” is a particularly somber take on how fleeting it is to know another person. “You’re working musicians and you take time together when you get it,” Rawlings says. “As we were on the road more and got more successful, I would see Guy at festivals here and there, and we would always make time for each other, but you don’t get to spend as much time as you want with someone. And you listen to their records just like you listen to anybody’s records who you love but, with Guy, you just have a special feeling for the people who showed you the ropes and who taught you about songwriting and artistic integrity.” “Hashtag” also wound up being the first song that Welch and Rawlings added strings to, as they overdubbed their original performance late one night at Woodland after finding an old demo tape that “hit us really hard.” “It felt like the ghosts were there,” Rawlings concludes.

There is loss on a record like Woodland, and there’s confusion and haggling over the price of getting older and how we are remembered. But there is warmth embedded in the ache, and even when a river dries up or an apocalypse is nigh, moments pass, Ketch Secor’s fiddle cracks open the bailiwick and a sweetness echoes. These 10 songs were made in a place that was, quite literally, brought back to life, and, in turn, these 10 songs can teach a person a whole lot about the idea of “renewal.” It certainly has transformed Welch’s outlook: “I think I’ve learned that tremendous pain and destruction, if you can keep your head, makes way for new growth, as long as you continue to really participate and try,” she says. “If you give up, then you’re just sitting there in the rubble, in the ashes. I don’t really know anything about Eastern philosophy, but I’ve heard little whispers of things, that there is no such thing, really, as a ‘bad occurrence.’ There’s just an occurrence. I think I understand that a little bit now. Of course, things are going to be painful. It doesn’t really make them bad.”

At the dusk of Woodland, this chapter of the Welch-Rawlings canon ends in harmony, as they sing “You and me, always walk that lonesome valley” in a delivery as gentle as the two-part guitar chords breathing in and out beneath their voices. Almost 30 years ago, it was just the two of them and a half-dozen unlearned lessons. Now, Welch has “been all around this world” and, across the 10 songs on Woodland, is comfortable with there being no arrivals or exits. The dreams she and Rawlings sing of just are, existing like breathtaking, momentous bursts of light gleaned from catastrophe—perspectives falling through the niches in our hearts. And that is where they retreated after that tornado ripped through Nashville and leveled parts of their beloved studio four years ago. They met each other at their most solid foundation, guiding themselves through catastrophe by returning to the American folk music canon, the most consequential atoms woven into the fabric of what they do and who they are. “We sat in our living room and played folk music every night,” Welch says. “We sang the songs that we first sang together.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.