Gillian Welch & David Rawlings - Woodland

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings — Woodland

2024 album of originals from the Grammy-winning American folk duo!

Mastered from the original analog tapes

Pressed at Paramount Pressings in Denver

"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." — PopMatters

"Woodland is ultimately about these two people, these two voices, and these two guitars. Never is it more moving than when there are simply playing together the way they might at home, blurring the line of who is singing lead on 'Howdy Howdy' or who is picking which note on 'The Bells & The Birds.' Adding new flourishes to their core sound, Woodland is a beautiful addition to their catalogue." — Uncut

It's been a long time but as a commenter noted on the YouTube video for their first track on Woodland, the 2024 album from American folk legends Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, "this album renews the joy of the music of Gillian and David."

Woodland is the first album of originals attributed to Welch and Rawlings together, though the duo have released eight previous albums of their original material (plus a 2020 collection of covers that set the likes of Bob Dylan's 'Abandoned Love' beside traditionals and won a Grammy). They have long contended that they're members of a "two-piece band called Gillian Welch" — a decision instigated in part by their former record label, as women singer-songwriters were becoming a '90s phenomenon.

Their new album is the latest in a long collaboration between the two musicians who, as NPR notes, have built careers — and an influential legacy — out of the magnetic interplay between their voices and the strength of their musical ideas.

The album is named for the storied East Nashville studio they have owned for 23 years and where, early in March 2020, a tornado of Biblical proportions tore off the roof and threatened to capsize the whole of their life's work. The storm left the pair knee-deep in water and pitch-black darkness as they risked their earthly existences to save the materials constituting their musical ones.

Amid the guitars and gear were the collected master tapes of their poised, literary songs dating back to the mid-1990s, when Welch and Rawlings began distilling 1930s country and sharp-angled brother-team bluegrass and rural folk into their own austere sonic grammar — alchemizing pain into transcendence, dissolving conventional time, putting Elvis and the Titanic into the same America as a five-band punk bill and blending harmonies so chilling they are said to have made Townes Van Zandt howl like a wolf.

Almost all of Woodland's songs of loss and resilience were penned after the flood, tracked in the rebuilt studio with clarified stakes.

"That was the longest night," Welch remembers, about the storm. "It'd be hard for me to describe what it felt like when the sun finally came — an absolutely fundamental, primal experience. The sun, man: it's no joke."

In the four years since, Rawlings and Welch have worked more than ever in Woodland, not only repairing the space but methodically sorting through perhaps 100 songs, Welch estimates. Woodland was their place of resolve.

"You don't miss your water 'til the well runs dry," Welch says. "There are things in life you take for granted, things in life you don't think will be destroyed. But by the same token, there are contradictions, complications. There is a renewal, but with stories and scars. I feel like a new shoot, tender and new."

Welch and Rawlings shape a record for as long as it takes to be right.

"I wish it wasn't this way. I love it when my favorite bands put out new music," says Rawlings. "It's just how we move."

Recorded in Nashville, Tennessee at Welch and Rawlings' own Woodland Sound Studios. Mastered directly from the original tapes through custom Ortofon amplifiers to a Neumann VMS-80 cutting system. Produced by David Rawlings.