On 23 August 2024, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings released their 10th studio album, Woodland. The two have collaborated since meeting at Berklee College of Music in the early 1990s when they both auditioned for the only country music ensemble the school offered. Shortly after graduating in 1992 (Welch had studied songwriting, Rawlings had studied guitar performance), the two moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where their reputation grew as American folk and traditional roots narrative songwriters. Their gifts as masters of storytelling through precise, expressive acoustic arrangements are on full display on Woodland.
The album shares the name of Woodland Studios, one of Nashville’s storied recording studios, which the pair bought shortly after the turn of the millennium. The LP cover features the pair in the lower right corner of the photo against the black brick exterior of the studio accented by “Woodland” in mid-century sans-serif script. The off-center placement of the duo in the image mirrors the geographic and musical legacy of the studio itself. Formed in 1967 by Glenn Snoddy, Woodland Studios lies east of the Cumberland River in Nashville. On the west side of the river is where one finds the neon-lit honky tonks and themed bars of Lower Broadway and the midtown Music Row, where you can see the famed RCA Studio B.
Just off the center of Music City’s recording ground zero, Woodland Studio’s location mirrors the adjacency of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ profoundly influential folk roots to the Top-40 radio country music stereotypically associated with Nashville. Over the years, Nashville has been publicly synonymous with a popularized caricature of the “Southern experience”, a manufactured image that barely bears a tangential relationship to reality. These are the songs chock full of ciphers like trucks, dogs, flags, family, summertime, and corn farms, with most of the rough edges of life finely sanded smooth except for winks and nods to whiskey overconsumption.
But country and roots music is historically an authentic form of American storytelling, tracing the blood, sweat, and tears of the marginal, the working class, and those who have negotiated and been wounded by what the Drive-By Truckers called “the duality of the Southern thing”. The richness of narrative songcraft forms the heart of Woodland, and it features Gillian Welch and David Rawlings as masters of the art.
This songcraft is seen immediately on the first track, “Empty Trainload of Sky”. Welch and Rawlings weave a philosophical twist on the freight train trope from country music’s roots in the song to trace the shadows of empty movement, displacement, and the fine line between disappearing and being consumed. A mere two miles east of their Woodland recording studio lies Nashville’s Shelby Bottoms greenway, where a massive steel trestle bridge provides passage for CSX freight trains over the Cumberland River into downtown. The lush foliage of the greenway foregrounds the bridge, but the train’s motion draws the eye to the striking background of the sky, providing a humbling reminder of one’s scale and scope in the grand scheme of things.
In the lyrics, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings use this image to conjure the crossroads, both in the transportational and existential sense. They swing between gestures at Damocles’s sword and Neil Young‘s journey out of the black and into the blue to enact the uncertain vertigo of life’s movement while finding resilient resonances within. With haunting vocals and acoustic guitar, Welch and Rawlings serve as conductors, transporting the listener across the tracks. At the same time, Brian Allen’s bass and Chris Powell’s drums provide a rhythmic engine. Meanwhile, Russ Pahl’s inflections on pedal steel guitar orient you to the folk and roots landscape. It is an arresting and mesmerizing opener to the album’s contents.
On the second track (“What We Had”), Rawlings takes the initial vocal lead until Welch joins in harmony, then moves into a back-and-forth between the two. The song weaves a tale of longing, regret, and nostalgia for the gift of simple presence to another. The fuller band is absent on the third track (“Lawman”) for a stripped-down acoustic duo in the service of a folk, western tale of frontier resilience and an ominous lawman whose pursuit threatens family stasis. The song’s exquisite simplicity and harmony provide a take on the haunted prairie folk tale beautifully rendered by Gillian Welch’s signature, plaintive storytelling. Rawlings’ technical artistry on the acoustic guitar and guitjo punctuate the song’s anxious heart.
Another highlight is “North Country”, which highlights David Rawlings’ production booth skills at mastering and mixing the soundscape, which is one of the record’s strengths. “North Country” has an intricate and delicate mix with careful attention to spatial detail. While one can appreciate Woodland in several listening mediums, this particular song rewards experiencing it on a good set of headphones where the mix creates the sparse aural space of the north country motif as the pedal steel haunts the edges of the terrain like a spectral image of longing, separation, and the burden of freedom on the range. It is one of the many gifts of this album, stunning in its simplicity.
This creative duo mixes innovative twists with traditional styles within the album’s contents. “Turf the Gambler” is a Bob Dylan-esque tale in vocal delivery and songwriting metaphors. “Here Stands a Woman” poignantly faces aging without romanticization, highlighting gritty resilience and wisdom. Throughout Woodland, Welch and Rawlings underscore the sinews of relationships that are stretched but never torn. “Howdy Howdy” closes the album with a vocal call and response between the duo that draws deep from imagery that Gillian Welch told Slate came from “gospel and spiritual vernacular” that bespeak themes she identifies as “[c]onnection and dissolution.”
Woodland brilliantly enacts these themes as Gillian Welch and David Rawlings solidify their status as iconic American folk, roots, and country music storytellers. The record carries a quiet presence that is both powerful and fleeting. It is a beautiful addition to their already storied creative partnership.
Woodland is currently available on all streaming platforms and will be released on vinyl and CD on 15 November 2024.