Nonmusicians are surely unaware of how much certain recording studios mean to the singers, songwriters, engineers and producers who spend so much of their lives working in them. Studios are especially important (if not entirely sacrosanct) when they are owned and run by musicians, as much a welcoming home from home as a remote cabin in the woods.
The new album – their 10th – by the Americana-royalty couple of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings is named after their Woodland Sound Studios, in Nashville, Tennessee, which were felled by a tornado in 2020. “The music is and songs are a swirl of contradictions, emptiness, fullness, joy, grief, destruction, permanence,” says Welch, referencing almost four years of rebuilding, refurbishing and replacing.
If you’re familiar with the pair’s work, the outcome is also familiar: sparse, delicate, textured, delivered unobtrusively with nuggets of storytelling expertise and wisdom. A song such as The Day the Mississippi Died is a case in point. It lurches along, not unlike Basement Tapes-era Bob Dyan/The Band, with lyrics that tell a story of communal interaction and personal detail (“I try to treat my neighbours like I like them to treat me, even when they got that dog and cut down that tree. I hate that barking dog, I miss that old oak every day, but I don’t expect everyone to see the world my way”).
Another song, Lawman, is as simple and beguiling as old-world rustic Americana/folk can get. Guitars are gently strummed as Welch sings about the titular character, who polices an arid, poverty-ridden territory that will always need to see better times: “And the fire’s gonna burn down to nothing, poor folk gonna scrap for a piece of bread, and the preacher’s gonna preach from the Bible ... Devil’s gonna laugh at what he said.”
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The album’s other eight songs are presented in the same manner. Sometimes the duo surround themselves with a full band; mostly they don’t; and sometimes they each take lead vocals. Nothing is hurried for this collection of freewheeling, impressionistic songs underscored by despair, anxiety and the will to overcome whatever life throws at them.
