They’re One of the Most Indelible Pairs in American Music. A Tornado Didn’t Manage to Stop Them.
For 30 years now, Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings have been making music together. Their country-folk songs, delivered in beautiful two-part harmony and often featuring Rawlings’ intricate guitar work, are steeped with a century’s worth of American tradition. But the songwriters also chronicle contemporary uncertainty with a gimlet eye: “Everything Is Free” remains the best song ever made about forging a music career in the internet era, and their “Hard Times” speaks to every American who’s battling it out with 21st-century economic trouble, even as it embraces the spirit and language of the Great Depression to beautiful effect.
Welch and Rawlings’ new album, Woodland, is a little more lush than many of its predecessors, featuring strings and steel guitar alongside the pair’s usual two-guitar setup. But like all their albums, it remains a testament to the power of two people who deeply love making music together. I called to ask them about their many years in Nashville and the new record. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Dan Kois: Tell me about Woodland Studios, where you write and record in Nashville. How did you two end up owning that space?
David Rawlings: We had worked at Woodland first in the mid-’90s on the first record that we made. It was one of the first recording studios I think we ever worked in.
Gillian Welch: And then strangely, we were on one of the sessions that was probably the last sessions that happened before it closed down, which was a Ryan Adams record called Heartbreaker.
Where you guys get in an argument about Morrissey.
Rawlings: [Laughs.]
Welch: Yes, exactly.
Rawlings: Woodland was damaged in the tornado that came through in—I guess that was ’98. And that set off a dispute between the gentleman who was running the recording studios and the guy who owned the building over the insurance for the tornado or whatever, who knows. The guy who owned the building put the building up for sale.
What was appealing about it? Your own history there?
Rawlings: It goes all the way back to the ’60s when it was built.
Welch: A bunch of records I had, I knew were from there, like Neil Young, Comes a Time. And the Will the Circle Be Unbroken album.
And y’all had your own tornado hit it in 2020, right? That must have been pretty harrowing.
Rawlings: Yeah, we felt left out. So we conjured one of our own.
Welch: [Laughs.]
Rawlings: It’s sort of like a water witch with a dowsing rod, but it’s a wind witch.
What was the rebuild like?
Rawlings: Well, it’s still going on. It’s been what, four or five years now, and I expect it’ll be another few years before it finally is fully repaired. But we were very lucky—we had a lot of damage, and it was a traumatic thing, but it could have been much, much worse. The building still stands. And we saved almost all of our gear and equipment the night of the tornado when it was all open to the elements.
Welch: It was quite miraculous, really, that we saved nearly everything.
You two met at music school, right?
Welch: We did, yeah. In Boston, at the Berklee College of Music.
What’s something that you guys learned at Berklee that you still think about all the time? Or has it all flown away?
Welch: No, it hasn’t flown away. Well, it’s going to sound silly, but I pretty much learned solfège at Berklee. You know: do, re, mi. It’s really great for figuring out music parts and harmony parts. If I’m working on a melody and I don’t have a recorder on me, which I often don’t, I will drill it into my mind with solfège so that I remember what I’m singing. I use it every day.
Rawlings: So much of the harmony and the music theory that I learned, it comes in handy as a language when discussing things with other musicians. And when you are working on something and you’re not sure what to do, you can say, “Well, I know I tend to like these kinds of dissonances or intervals. Let me just try a couple things.” And to be able to find them quickly because of that knowledge.
Welch: It’s really useful to have some way to express these natural inclinations, these preferences for certain sounds. And you kind of learn what those sounds are called, and then how to communicate what you like with other musicians.
Rawlings: I tend to think that people who say that their creativity was stifled by formal training, something else would’ve stifled their creativity anyway. I mean, it’s just knowledge. You know what I mean?
I’ve been listening to you two duet for decades now, and you always have seemed to be really comfortable with each other’s voices. Are there ways that you two still surprise each other musically?
Welch: Well, it’s funny. Our two vocal ranges really aren’t that different. For instance, on this record, the very last song on the album is one that we share the lead vocal on, a song called “Howdy Howdy.”
Right, you go back and forth from line to line.
Welch: In the verse, Dave takes the high part of the melody and I take the low part of the melody. It’s kind of the opposite of what you would expect when a woman and a man are splitting vocals. But I think it kind of shows off what’s always been one of the great parts of Dave’s voice, which is his ability to really get up into the tenor range and be strident and have character. And likewise, my ability to get down into the alto range and have some power down there. But some people have admitted to us over the years that they can’t always tell our voices apart.
Yeah, you’re not sure who’s doing what part.
Rawlings: Yeah, there’s a Ryan Adams record where I think we were both singing harmony on different songs. And I think they got them mixed up on the credits.
That last song, I love the way that describes a relationship: “You and me are always gonna be howdy howdy.” Where did that term come from, and is that something that you’ve used to describe yourselves?
Welch: I had heard the phrase “howdy howdy.” It comes from gospel or spiritual vernacular. There’s all those phrases: “all around God’s altar,” “the lily of the valley.” It kind of comes at the feeling sideways to say, “We’re always going to be howdy howdy.” What does that mean? It’s not literal, but it’s beautiful. It puts a smile on your face. But then to bang it right up against, “You and me always walk that lonesome valley” is nice. It sort of speaks at a type of contradiction or contrast that seems to sort of run through the whole album.
Right, there’s connection, but there’s also solitude happening at the same time.
Welch: Yes. Connection and dissolution.
Around 2000, you two started releasing your music independently, on your own label.
Rawlings: Oh, I always think back to a walk that we took after our old label, Almo Sounds, was going to basically close down and we were trying to decide what we would do next. We knew we weren’t going to go to Interscope, which is where that label was going. We wanted to go somewhere where it was going to be stable. It was post-Napster, but before anything had really settled, and there was such profound instability. And the only places that I could really think where we might have a chance would’ve been to go to Nonesuch Records—
Welch: I thought maybe Rounder.
Rawlings: —or to start our own label. Gill asked Jerry Moss to sell us the masters for our first two records.
Welch: Yeah. We never could have started the label from such a good place without starting it with the masters for our first two albums. That sort of enabled us. The first thing we did was reissue those first two albums.
That change happened around the same time you bought the studio, at least within a couple of years. It did not escape my notice that all of this happened around the same time that the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack was doing really well. Was that all related?
Welch: [Laughs.] Actually, no. No. I made very little money off O Brother.
Rawlings: Oh, yeah. Because she got paid a flat rate as associate producer, which was a pittance.
Welch: A terrible deal.
Rawlings: And then it didn’t matter how many millions of copies it sold, that didn’t trickle much down to us. And weirdly, if you think about it, there were tons of tracks on that record, and Gill was one-third of “Nobody but the Baby” and one half of “I’ll Fly Away” and that’s it.
Welch: Yeah.
Rawlings: I mean, there’s no point focusing on it. It was an incredibly great thing to be involved with and it was an incredible project. But it didn’t turn into a windfall.
Welch: But it was funny, Dave, I remember you and I saying, “Oh, man, people are going to think we were able to buy this because of O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” and that was just not the case at all.
Rawlings: We got an SBA loan, to be honest. That’s how we could afford to buy the studio. It took about eight months, I think, to get financing. And this place was—you could have bought a one-bedroom in Echo Park, or you could have bought this property. It was not a lot of money.
The song “Hashtag” on the new record is about Guy Clark, the singer-songwriter who died in 2016. Can you tell me a little bit about what he meant to you?
Welch: Well, he was a very staunch early supporter. When our first songs were starting to kind of circulate around town on cassette tapes, and we were playing writers nights and whatnot, unbeknownst to us, Guy was going around talking about us at bars all over town, and in fact, quoting portions of our songs to people.
Rawlings: He was deadly serious about his art and his work, but he was also an incredibly warm and lighthearted person. He was an enigma. It’s like anyone who you could call a genius—as he was. Half of my memories of Guy are basically him roughhousing with me as a twentysomething guy. Just like, “Dave, come here!” Or trying to get me drunk when we’re on tour or we’re sitting in a Motel 6 with the door open, eating barbecue out of a pan we took from the venue and just laughing. And then others are really serious conversations about music and what it is to be on the road or what it is to be a musician. And it was all—
Welch: Well, to devote your life to this. I think he was the first person I really got to see behind the curtain and see what it is, to make this your life. And it looked OK.