In the Spring of 1996, I was feeding my American roots music obsession, ransacking any radio stations I could find, reading books and magazines about different eras and subgenres, and hoovering up recordings by artists new and old. Then one afternoon, driving around my short-term home of Little Rock, AR, a singer appeared on NPR who sounded hip and ancestral at the same time.
The feature was about Gillian Welch and Revival, the debut album she released 30 years ago today. It had a rosined, neo-Appalachian timbre and lyrics about moonshining, migrant workers scraping by, and (a soon-to-be-famous) “Orphan Girl”. This soulful folk wasn’t spilling out of a regional mountain balladeer but a Nashville-based, college-educated Californian who was almost exactly my age. Her partner David Rawlings, while publicity shy, was essential to the music’s unique ambience with his keening vocal harmonies and his pointillistic, downstroke-heavy guitar picking. It was a cousin to bluegrass, a descendent of mountain gospel, and an homage to the Carter Family’s austere but moving proto-country music. Its crafty hybrid sound perfectly fit the emerging concept/format called Americana.
That first CD, which I cherished, synched up with my move to Nashville later that year. I saw Welch and Rawlings at Merlefest multiple times in those years, and they were mesmerizing. For me and for roots music, nothing would be the same. Welch was a central voice on the explosively influential O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. Her songs and artistry directly inspired the influential Bay Area Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. Welch and Rawlings were granted an Americana Lifetime Achievement Award for songwriting in 2015, and after several near misses, they won Best Folk Album at the Grammy Awards for their consecutive albums All The Good Times (Are Past & Gone) and Woodland.
Little about this track record and trajectory pointed obviously to the musical situation that Gil and Dave (to their fans and friends) find themselves in now, yet when it was announced, the community seemed to nod and smile, as if it made all the sense in the world. On Saturday night at the Brooklyn Bowl, I watched the duo/couple, so famous for their deliberate and nuanced performances embrace the fractal spontaneity of the Grateful Dead.
Last weekend’s two packed shows launched a tour called Acoustic Reckoning, referencing a 1981 live album that captured the Dead in what MTV would later call an “unplugged” format. On Reckoning, The Dead blended back porch versions of staples like “Bird Song,” “Ripple,” and “Cassidy” with interpretations of the old folk, blues, country and bluegrass songs that first inspired Jerry Garcia to learn the banjo and launch a performing career, including “Dark Hollow,” “Rosa Lee McFall,” and Elizabeth Cotten’s “Babe It Ain’t No Lie.” The roots songs feel right in the Gillian Welch wheelhouse, while the Dead had more influence on her than many suspect.
While most Dead tributes (and there are mega-scads of them) reconstruct the band’s electrified, double drum-kit architecture, Welch and Rawlings did more with less - two guitars and voices, the critical support of master bass player Paul Kowert (Punch Brothers), and one snare drum, which Welch and Kowert shared in the most charming and unpredictable ways. While heavily inspired by Reckoning, these shows are not cut-by-cut recreations. They’re weaving in other Dead material and playing different set lists each night, structured in the Dead’s archetypal two-set-plus-encore model. For example, Friday night opened with non-Reckoning numbers “Bertha” and closed with “St. Stephen,” “Not Fade Away,” and “Morning Dew.”
During my Saturday night experience, the musicians set the songs to their signature stately tempos, sometimes for the better (a take on “Dark Hollow” that felt especially personal) and sometimes leading to some lulls. That said, a feisty “Jack-A-Roe” lent vibrant energy to the 200-year-old ballad, flowing into the best jam of the night, a set-closing “Cassidy” that led to some magical abstract dialogue between Dave’s guitar and Kowert’s bass. I ran into Nashville’s Rich Mahan, co-host of the Good Ole Grateful Deadcast at the break, and he praised the duo’s interpretations with a clever digital metaphor for their level of understanding. Many Dead covers have an 8-bit awareness of the band’s layers, he said, while the Welch/Rawlings operating system was working with 32-bit levels of resolution and insight.
Between the anniversary of a seminal album and the launch of a savvy and exciting concept tour, it seems like a great time to connect with Gillian Welch. We had the following conversation by phone a few days before the shows, on Wednesday, April 1 It’s presented here with light edits for space and clarity.
I feel like in working with producer T Bone Burnett on Revival, you and Dave dialed in an esthetic and tone that became a signature style. What do you remember about the production?
Oh, man. Well, you're right about the sound that we kind of established or found in that first week. Many things that started in that first week we still do. (T Bone’s engineer Rik Pekkonen) put David and I on the vocal mics that we continued to record with forever, the Neumann M-49, and the way he set us up, sitting facing each other about as close as we could be - that's how we still record. So I mean, I almost can't begin to say what it meant, and what it continues to mean, that T Bone really got what we were. But I will say, to our credit, we got that he got what we were. There were other producers around, great producers, but everybody scared us a little bit that they were going to do something with us. You know, I remember one guy saying, ‘Well, who do you hear playing guitar on the record? And both Dave and I kind of gave each other the side eye, and we're like, all we have are guitar players! What do you mean? You know?
So anyway, that first week we started making Revival, T Bone put us in the chairs, no headphones, just live recording, and we just played through all the songs, duet. And that was the basis of the record. We ended up playing some of the songs with (drummer) Jim Keltner, (guitarist) James Burton, with (steel player) Greg Leisz. But the beginning of the album was just playing duets and seeing what we got. Also it's worth noting that was the first day David had ever played his Epiphone! I mean, the story is out there - the story, the myth, the legend - of finding the guitar in our friend's basement up in New England without a bridge, without strings. And Dave brought it home and got Joe Glaser to make a bridge for it, which they designed together. We both heard it and thought that's kind of cool. (We) put it in a cardboard box and shipped it out to Hollywood Sunset Sound, where we made that record.
So, you guys like rock and roll. You all have collaborated with many artists. But the records you've made as Gillian Welch or Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have continued to be more reliant on nuance, subtlety and close vocals. Was this out of wanting to maintain a consistency, or a devotion to the brother acts of the 1930s? Why this calling card sound through the years?
That's a great question. You know, the truth is, it's really easy to maintain this and really painful. The truth is, we just don't like that many things. (laughs) That's the crassest way of putting it. But basically, we seem to have this strict esthetic. We don't mean to. We don't want to. Life would be easier if we weren't this way. But this is what we like. We are constantly just trying to make sounds that we can live with, that we like, and it always seems to happen that when we approach this certain kind of duet harmony, a certain sort of panoramic soundscape, a certain sort of feel, then we get happy. So we seem to have this esthetic governor on the sounds we make.
Another anniversary this year is the O Brother soundtrack 25 years ago. How did that and the Down from the Mountain companion tours change your life and your musical world?
Wow. How did it change my life? Suddenly, people everywhere knew Ralph Stanley and the Stanley Brothers. I mean, it was crazy! I'd be walking down the street in Detroit, and I’d literally hear somebody on a street corner singing “Man Of Constant Sorrow.” It was like this weird, fantastical dream, you know? That album was kind of my record collection come to life. So it's a beautiful thing. It was some of the music I care about most in the world. The Stanley Brothers and John Hartford and Norman Blake and the Fairfield Four. These were records and musicians that I had been living with for a very long time and were very important to me, and so to kind of help make this soundtrack, and then to have millions and millions of people care about this music too. It was wild. It was wild.
What it really did was kind of let me relax. It's like I had proved to myself that that really was my world. And then, interestingly, what that precipitated was the ability to kind of depart and make Time (The Revelator). Because I felt so at ease knowing my community and knowing that David and I were completely woven into the contemporary acoustic, old-time, roots/folk community, that I think we had a certain confidence that we could explore and push a little and put a little bit more of our own day-to-day angst and reveal a little bit more of ourselves. You wouldn't maybe know it, but I'm a very private, almost shy person. David too is incredibly private. And so it took getting to the third record to feel like we could really start to, you know, unload the space behind our eyeballs right into the records.
I have to ask about Woodland Studio, which you and David acquired in 2002. It’s given you a place to work and a role in holding on to Nashville history and legacy. I’m so glad you foregrounded it on your last album (2024’s Woodland). Personally I lived three blocks from it for 12 years and it’s meant so much to Nashville. What’s it meant to you?
Well, first of all, I couldn't agree more. I mean, can you imagine Nashville with Woodland gone?. So Dave and I do feel proud and just so honored to have had any part in securing Woodland in its precarious moment when it had been shuttered for two years or whatever, and was being actively looked at by various big box stores to basically tear it down. I'm really happy it's not a drugstore.
How about your creative life together?
Yeah, it's like a weird spaceship that we get to live on. It gives to us, and we give to it, you know? T Bone was kind of the one who said to us, ‘Look, you need to have access to recording equipment 24/7.’ He said, ‘You guys, you're about performance. It's about capturing the performance and the moment.’ And so that's really where the idea came from. And Dave is enough of an engineer that he didn't even blink, you know? He's like, Okay! And so we built a little two-track studio in our living room, and then we built a studio in another friend's space. And then we built the studio in RCA B and made Time (The Revelator) when it was vacant. And then finally, we got Woodland in September of 2002 and kind of built our permanent home. And I mean, it's a lot of work, and it's not for the faint of heart. But I don't know how else we would do it. You know? We just - we're kind of all about independence and freedom. We just don't like being curtailed. We kind of need to know that there's tape and a tape machine and a room and microphones over there, and we can go record.
And what’s behind this tour featuring the Dead’s Reckoning? Why are you doing it?
It wasn't our idea. I'm not sure I would have had you know the gumption to say, oh, let's do an entire Dead show. But a couple people came to us and told us, you know, it was an anniversary year. It's not one with a zero at the end. It's 45 years. But it’s a big, tall mountain for us. You know, we'll see. We're going to do what we can. I hope people dig it. It's already been an extraordinary experience for us, shedding and learning the songs. I mean, I've known the songs for decades, but it's a different thing to play them, you know? Much like yourself, that acoustic record is really a big deal for a lot of folks. So it's a great way for us to kind of dip our toe into the Grateful Dead pool.
David has been pretty overt about his Deadheadedness over the years. I have never known your take on that band. Does this record mean a particular thing sentimentally to you?
My quick answer is no, not to me. To me, the switch got flipped - I started seeing the Dead - when I was 18. My first show was at San Francisco Civic on Chinese New Year, 1987. And then I followed them for a while. You know the reference in our song, “Wrecking Ball” to being “a little Deadhead,” that's for real. I probably saw maybe just upwards of 30 shows. So I'm kind of surprised that we're taking this on, because the music means so much to us that it's a little daunting. But we were asked and encouraged, and we're completely willing and beyond excited. So we'll just see. We'll see.
