Gillian Welch and David Rawlings on Their New Album, ‘Woodland’

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are not the first musicians ever to name an album after a favorite studio or, in their case, the one they own and operate in East Nashville. But “Woodland” isn’t just a random title — it really does reflect the hardships and triumphs that came about over the last few years at the recording facility of the same name, which had its roof blasted off in the famous Tennessee tornado of 2020, right before lockdown made everything still more difficult. With that adversity as a backdrop for their new material, the wish that hard times would come again no more is as deeply rooted in these 10 songs as it was in the four-year rebuilding process for the studio where much of the acclaimed roots music of the last quarter-century has gone down.

“Woodland” is the first album of new studio material released jointly under both Welch’s and Rawling’s name, although that fact could nearly go unnoticed, since they’ve been co-billed out on the road for decades at this point, and fans know that each record by any of them up to this point has been deeply collaborative. Those devotees haven’t been starved for material, since the two of them did make a Grammy-winning covers album together during the pandemic, and retrospective projects covering the eras dating back to Welch’s breakthrough in 1993 with the T Bone Burnett-produced “Revival” have filled any gaps, along with jointly recorded releases under Rawlings’ band moniker. Still, this is the first album of fresh material to come out with her name on it since 2011’s “The Harrow & the Harvest,” and as such, counts as a very big deal in the worlds of folk and Americana, though that might be said for any project they collectively lay their hands on.

Variety spoke with both partners in the collaboration by phone on the day “Woodland” was released in late August. First, let’s hear from Welch, then Rawlings:

GILLIAN WELCH

It’s good to talk with you on the actual release day for your record. Do you sit back and read any fan comments or reviews or anything like that on the day an album comes out?

Welch: I do check in some. It’s been long enough between our records that it is nice — well, more than nice; it’s absolutely essential and fantastic — that people still care when we put a record out.

Not to dive right into heavy stuff, but I was thinking today about how there was a very strange moment during the pandemic that really, really put the brakes on. I feel like everybody I knew, and around our house, for sure, went into serious, serious survival mode. I went into that apocalyptic mindset and I suddenly thought, “Well, this is really serious. Nobody needs what we do. They need food. They don’t need art, they don’t need music.” I have such respect for the arts, and they’ve kept me alive so often — I never really felt like what we did was unnecessary. But in that moment, I really was shaken. And I actually called a DJ friend of ours who’s since passed, Rita Houston, and she sort of brought my head back around to: Oh, no, music is how we get through the worst times. And so I’ve tried to hang on to that, and that feeling stayed with us all the way through this album. There was so much loss, so much destruction, and so much change. I never thought I would say so many times, “Wow. I didn’t see that coming.” You know, I never thought I’d get hit by a tornado. I didn’t really think about these things. Anyway, this is a strange launch to our conversation, but that’s where my mind was.

Of course people will wonder how much this record was affected by the times.

Maybe I always feel this way, I don’t know, but I feel like this record more than any other record of ours is a product of the times of which it was created. All the songs have personal narratives, but they’re also kind of cultural narratives. When someone was asking me about [the opening song] “What We Had,” I think they were fishing, trying to figure out: Is this real? Was there a romantic breakup? But that’s kind of missing the point, because so much had disappeared, and so much was lost, that it would be an untruth to say that that song was just about two people. I was thinking about the evaporation of our entire lifestyle, and our ability to tour, you know? For a moment there, it’s like my entire life was just gone. So that’s in there too. And that’s often the case with us. It’s like if a song doesn’t function on more than one level, we don’t really like it.

Certainly it would not be unlike you guys to write songs about people who were dealing with calamity or had some loss or have hard times in some way. That’s kind of a fixture. You don’t have a whole catalog of completely happy-go-lucky songs.

No, we don’t. That’s not how my brain works. You know, it doesn’t mean I’m a morose person. It’s actually quite the contrary. It means that I’m kind of undaunted by life’s more destructive moments. I’m probably more perplexed by the happy times.

Listening to these songs, there’s a bunch of cold weather references. And it’s not necessarily like you’re having like a hard freeze in Nashville all the time, but it’s like, there is weather in the album. And you certainly dealt with weather in a big way with the tornado…

There’s always weather, don’t you think? It’s the great truth. I’ve always been very aware and very moved by the weather. As a small child, high winds just scared me to pieces. But now I find… what is paramount? What has governance over all of us? The weather. I feel like a lot of people are realizing there is some enormous thing that is beyond our control — well, somewhat beyond our control. But also, weather is one of those beautiful things that can present itself in song and gives this beautiful kind of tangible structure.

You know, we’ve become friends with Barry Gibb since he asked us to play on his country record that he made a few years back. He’s a prince, and such a great songwriter, and I’ve just adored the conversations we’ve had. And he was reading me some titles that he was thinking of working on, and he said something about a second verse and said, “Well, there could be a weather event.” I thought, yes, this is the great second verse go-to: the weather event! And then of course, in our world, what happens in the third verse? Well, you always have, like, death or the devil.

You had the double whammy that many people in Nashville did, of the tornado — which wrecked your studio — coming just before the pandemic. Did that just slow down your process, or was there any silver lining where it give you a differet kind of impetus?

It did certainly slow us down. You don’t expect two years of just brutal reconstruction. But honestly, just to be perfectly frank, it was so fascinating — the full stop. We couldn’t tour because of the pandemic, and we couldn’t go record because our studio was destroyed. So what did we do? We sat in the living room and we focused on playing, and not on stage, not into microphones. That kind of playing that often falls by the wayside after you really have a career — the playing in the living room with no audience, that playing that kind of makes you who you are. Dave and I many times commented to each other that it was so reminiscent of right when we moved to Nashville and had no money and had nothing to do and we didn’t have really that many friends. And we would just sit in my living room and play and sing together and learn other people’s songs and work on our songs. So there was a strange purity to the moment, and it definitely affected the work. You have big phases in your life, and I feel like we really entered a new cycle, working on this record. All that time kind of standing still was the beginning of it. Great change happens when you stand still.

How did you make the decision to make this a true duo record? Your fans know that the records under either of your names are done together, but for anybody who looks up your discographies afresh, there should probably be a giant asterisk that says, “it’s complicated.”

Yeah. You know, we just couldn’t really go on with the deciding whose name was gonna be on it. It just felt absurd, especially after the time simply sitting in the living room, just the two of us. I don’t know how else to say it except that to put one of our names on this record would’ve been the height of absurdity. And as you say, I feel like people of any sensitivity sort of all have known for a very long time that whose-ever name is on it, we pretty much work exactly the same way.

Everyone who follows you does know you’re busy and there have always been projects and retrospective projects and new things. But if we were to actually look back at the last time that you had your name on the spine of an album of all original material, it was 2011.

Yeah, new original songs where I’m singing lead, it’s been a while. I mean, we do always feel busy. It’s not like we take vacations. But there’s just been a lot going on.

And also, sometimes I think time moves differently for me than for other people. Even with Dave and myself when we’re writing, time kind just seems to stretch out with me. With the work that he does on a song, he’s the person who goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth and comes back and says, “What about blah, blah, blah?” He does his work in moments, and I do my work in these expansive chunks of time. I sit on the sofa and watch the sun move across the sky, and that’s my work window. Dave’s can be brushing his teeth. And it’s just one of the reasons why I think we work so well together. We work very, very differently. But our yardstick is the same. We always agree when we get it right, and when something is actually done.

I would think this billing could be freeing in some ways, if in the past, you might have working on things spontaneously, but then if it doesn’t exactly fit the format of whose record it’s gonna be or what style of record it’s gonna be, you’d think, “Maybe we can’t use that right now.” I don’t know if you think that way.

No, you’re totally right. And that’s another aspect of just finally just calling it “Gillian Welch and David Rawlings,” is that there are songs on this record that, if it were just a Gillian Welch record, we might have abandoned them before they were even finished, or we might have just put them aside. Even something as personally successful as “Hashtag” probably would’ve gotten put aside if we were making a Gillian Welch record. We struggled with it, with me singing lead, and we just couldn’t get the tone to be right. As soon as Dave started singing it, everything started to fall into place, from the guitar arrangement and what key it was in to all those things that go into something sounding a particular way and having a certain emotional color. Yeah, it’s a tremendous relief and it is freeing, and I hope that people can tell and appreciate that by doing this, it’s letting us kind of expand our palette in a way that is very true to us personally.

Looking at the credits, you notice that about half the songs are just you and Dave, and half involve extra instrumentation, like pedal steel and drums or a string section. Was it deliberate to have the album balanced between those approaches?

Well, truthfully, we thought we were gonna make a double the album, because as you mentioned, time’s gone by, and we were getting up to 18, 19, 20 songs. We weren’t really sure how we would split them up. We were maybe going to put all the duets on one record and all the band stuff on the other. Or maybe all the stuff where I sang lead on one disc, and maybe all the stuff where he sang lead on the other. And in the end, Dave is our album sequencer, in addition to being our producer. We’d been trying to problem-solve this for a while, and then he came up with this test sequence, in literally his first swing at the record, and that’s what we went with. My hope is that maybe that other stuff is the beginning of another album. And maybe it won’t be quite so long before the next album — wouldn’t that be nice?

“Howdy Howdy” ends the album with a true duet between you and Dave, trading off lines. You haven’t had that many of those before. It’s almost sweet, almost a love song.

No. The first one was “Cumberland Gap” [off the 2017 album “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” billed as a Rawlings album]. That was the first time we’d traded vocals on a song, and it seemed OK. Our vocal ranges are close enough that we can do it. So yeah, “Howdy, Howdy” is an actual duet and was nice because the song is constructed sort of like riddles as a conversation.

There is sweetness and it is kind of a love song, but sort of a funny one where they say, “Yes, we will always be howdy, howdy, [but] we’ll always walk that lonesome valley,” but… It’s just par for the course on the record. There’s lots of conflict and contradiction all over the album. Writing “Trainload of Sky” was what kind of started the whole thing.  From the very beginning the record had this weird “is it empty or is it full” contradiction that sort of runs through the whole record: Is it lost, or is it changed, or is it renewed?

Maybe that accounts for the song “Turf the Gambler,” where the title character seems to be dead by the end of the first verse, but then apparently comes back to life.

Yeah, “transfixed, but not dead.”Which funnily enough is actually the Welch family motto, which we laugh about all the time. Nothing could be more perfect for me, prone to long bits of staring silently into space: transfixed, but not dead.

DAVID RAWLINGS

Was it a relief for the two of you to kind of finally settle in on: Yes, we can put both our names on this, and there can be different lead vocals and different even styles or instrumentation on the same album? I don’t know if you’ve ever felt in the past like you kind of had to limit things because of whose record it was or if was a preconceived notion of what the record should be.

The record just came out earlier today, but so far, the initial reaction in the world has seemed to be good, and I don’t think it really feels like too much of a sea change to anybody, which is nice. I would say that on our other records, there were small… concessions is a strong word, but (adjustments) because of the namewe were doing the record under. But you can also say that there was a latitude that was given when we were making a record under one or the other of our names, where we might just dig a little deeper in one way or another because we knew that was the job. It was like, OK, what does that predicate? What choices need to be made to make that the best it can be?

We got interesting that way. For instance, on the “Harrow and the Harvest” record, “The Way It Will Be” might have been a song that I was gonna sing, but I wanted to hear Gil sing it. So it’s interesting to be in a place where we felt like we could mix it up on and it would feel like its own creative work and have a life of its own … and wondering how to sequence it, wondering how to allow two (lead) vocals… as kind of a new challenge within the very strict kind of parameters that our music just seemed to have. The limitations were what limitations are in most creative work, which is kind of a good thing. But the challenges of trying to make a blended record now also facilitated or inspired some choices that we might not have made otherwise. I think some of the trading off of vocals was a good solution to songs that we weren’t really sure how we were gonna slot them in with one of us or the other. It felt like a fun thing to do.

Aside from the artistic work of the album, all the work you had to do to rebuild the studio after the tornado had to involve a great deal of pure menial labor.

Yes, there wasn’t much glamor in any of it. Worrying about where water’s leaking in, day after day trying to keep equipment dry, trying to just clean things up from the construction dust that ends up everywhere — it’s not a good environment for a studio. And there was also just a profound isolation to all of it, particularly during lockdown and COVID, but then, the world kind of moved on from that in a certain way. (Meanwhile at) Five Points, my path to walk from the house to the studio was right through the path of the tornado. It was years of demolition and construction everywhere, and buildings being torn down and new buildings being built back or restored. The emotions of loss and rebuilding were just tied into everyday life, and I could never really move on from those.

I can remember a time here at the studio — I was in one of the isolation booths in the B room — where I all of a sudden felt uneasy. I felt this feeling of anxiety and I was like, “What’s going on? What’s happening?” And I realized after a few seconds of thinking about it that what had happened is the jackhammering outside had stopped. You know, after months of reconstruction, you could hear a jackhammer at all times, and it was finally quiet and I wasn’t used to it.

Something about the jackhammers had come to be subliminally comforting somehow?

Yes, exactly. So you adapt. It’s like people who’ve been around the ocean too long, and when they get on land, they get landsick.

Did all of that affect the tone of the writing?

It did add a kind of personal touch to it. Certainly there’s always been a kind of a resilient optimism in our music. It’s seemingly kind of dark in a lot of ways, but there is usually something coming — maybe it’s just in the afterlife! — that people are holding up or holding onto. And I do think that being closer to that and maybe just being closer to a lot of people in the whole  society and culture where everybody was sort of going through this experience as a whole affected that. There is a lot of duality in the record. Lyrically there’s a lot of indecision about what things might mean, and are they good or are they bad? And I think when one experiences things in life that are challenging, you feel the need to try to find some good in it and try to accept the fact that you don’t know whether it’s for the good or the bad… to look for a reason or a purpose in things. And I think some of that found its way into our lyrics as we were writing.

Certainly there were a lot of different kinds of songs written during time period. We thought we were making a double record, and there’s a lot of material that didn’t turn up on “Woodland,” but the material that did had those strains, and that’s kind of what held them together as a piece. Most of those themes were affected or created by this experience of being in this same building for 14 hours a day, for four years, going through these different kinds of struggles and trying to make music in a not optimal situation.

What were your thoughts when it was possibly going to be a double album?

We considered every way that we could put out a record: Is it gonna be a double record? Is it gonna be two albums, like when Bright Eyes did “Digital Ash” and “This Morning” at the same time, and they’re gonna come out on the same day? Are we gonna make a record under one of our names each and put them out? It was all on the table. I didn’t want to dictate anything. I just kind of let the work guide itself. And then at a certain point, I started to sequence some of the music that I thought would be on maybe one of the collections, and I started to really see a thread. And then when the 10 songs got put in an order and I could kind of feel that, then I just slammed the door shut, because I felt like it was a work of art. And that’s kind of the way all the records have been: It all stays open and then all of a sudden it locks into something and you know that you’ve found something, and then I’ll fight to the death to not change a thing.

So I felt like that’s what happened with this. Once we had those songs together, we we were thinking about titling it “Empty Trainload of Sky,” but we weren’t over the moon about it, and we were trying to think of what tied it all together. And at some point I was sitting there and I thought, well, what about “Woodland”? That immediately seemed like it had resonance for us. It felt like the studio itself, even as it had been reborn, and we could record strings again, or we could record in a more intimate way than we had before, because we had added better isolation. It was peaceful in there, and I could run the tape machine myself and we didn’t even need an engineer for some of it. All of these things about the studio and the way the whole process worked, it all showed up in the art.

With this record, you had a lot of options before you settled on your song sequence, but it’s kind of half and half, as far as songs that are really just the two of you as, and then half that have a little more going on as far as string parts or pedal steel or drums. But a record kind of balanced between those things felt good to you.

(Doing more expansive songs) tied into the Woodland feeling, also, of just trying to make some different kinds of music in the studio where we had the latitude to do that. It was a hard-fought luxury to rebuild and to have the ability to do that, and to do a string session in this beautiful, open room now that hasn’t been one giant room like that since the ‘60s. It had gotten divided up into some booths and stuff, and in rebuilding it, I just took it all out because I prefer playing in one big room. And I have a little bit of a mischievous streak to me, and I like the idea of starting the album with “Empty Trainload of Sky,” which I think sounds kind of like something we would (normally) do, with my guitar similar to how it would be on a normal cut, but with the bass and drums — but then with the “What We Had” song, which is obviously with the strings and the pedal steel, it’s a more produced sound, which seemed to fit the song. I thought, well, they’ll hear that and think, have they gone crazy? I wanted them to be worried, like, is it all gonna be produced? And then just go straight back to (the stripped-down sound).

The vinyl and CD won’t be out for a few months. Did you feel okay with, or even an urgency about, putting it out digitally before the vinyl was available?

I think that’s just how the world is now. I would’ve liked to do it all simultaneously. Just with timelines and things, I think life is too short for to be waiting around to put out your music. I was just in the other room frantically trying to get the vinyl cut, to cut the  lacquers to send off…. You know, I’ve been rebuilding the lathe and that whole system to do mastering for the lacquers. So I’m still under the gun as we speak, even though the music’s out in the world.

One thing I will say that I’m really happy about is we’re partners in this pressing plant in Denver that we have kind of built, and at this point we’re mostly the owners of it, and that will give us some more latitude moving forward in order to get things done faster and keep things in stock always and do fun little products. Because we used to have to beg and steal and do whatever we can to cajole and call constantly to get our records pressed by the people who are doing the best job in the country. And now that person works for us. And maybe there will be a little renaissance of those kinds of projects for us because we have the bandwidth and the ability now. But the thing that’s interesting is, like if you really want to get great tip-on jackets, you have to use the people who are the best, and they’ve got a long waiting list, you know? The waiting lists just pile on top of each other. I mean, if you don’t want to do things at the optimal quality, you can do ’em a lot faster. And this is the story of my life.

Gary Alstrom is the guy you were talking about, who’s at your pressing plant?

Yes — I mean, he cares. He puts the same kind of level of workmanship and craftsmanship and detail and excellence into pressing records as we try to in writing the songs and recording them, so it’s a really wonderful thing. I do love that in some ways at this point, I can think of us and go, wow, we write the songs and we arrange and sing and record them, and produce and engineer them, and now we’re integrated into the production. We kind of are vertically integrated, as they say. We’re from soup to nuts.

It’s interesting, and refreshing, to think about the enduring popularity that you two have, and how the odds might have been against that in some ways.

You don’t think that going in to do old-time-influenced folk in 1993 was the road to riches? [Laughs.] Terrible idea! But you just do what you like and try to do it as well as you can. And if you get lucky and people can feel what you’re feeling, if you can sort of translate something people want to come hear you play, you’re just very lucky. I mean, I’ve never felt better than maybe the first time we played the Station Inn and we were opening for Peter Rowan and we were able to play for that room, which was probably 200 people, and have them all really enjoy it… Then shortly thereafter, maybe a month or two later, we played our own Station Inn show and the people came, and I thought, “Well, we’ll be able to do this as long as we want.” If you can get 150 people to come to a room to hear you sing, then that’s what this job is to me — you’ve done it. Anything above that is kind of gravy.

The audience for what the two of you do is so strong that it feels like it doesn’t matter so much what name you put on the record or if there’s a while between records — that audience will always be there waiting for you. Other artists are subject to the usual laws of fickleness, but with you guys it seems so reliable.

Well, I really appreciate it. I mean, we certainly haven’t flooded the market either. We’ve given ourselves a little bit of an easier job than people who have made 25 records. But we do have a lot of material around that. When we went out and played live (recently), we played four or five songs that weren’t on the record, and they went well. So hopefully we’ll have something else out and it won’t be as many years, and we can test your theory that they’ll always be there for us.