Since releasing their debut album, Revival, in 1996, Gillian Welch and her partner, guitarist David Rawlings, have been making tense and eerie acoustic music about desire and devastation, the sacred and the profane, little by little, Lord, little by little. The duo’s music – some of the first to be labelled “Americana” – often feels both ancient and visceral, as if these songs had always existed, seeping out of a gramophone on a distant astral plane. Today, it seems absurd that Welch’s heritage – she was adopted and grew up in Los Angeles – was once controversial in the roots music scene. Though she matured in the American South, the folk music she and Rawlings draw from is inherently inclusive and indulgent; to claim this kind of folk music as their own is to completely misunderstand their ethos. These songs blur notions of time and place and focus instead on the joys and sorrows that make us human.
This month, Welch and Rawlings release “Woodland,” their seventh collaboration. The album was shaped in part by the aftermath of a devastating tornado that swept through Nashville in the early hours of March 3, 2020. I recently spoke with Welch and Rawlings from their home on the city’s east side. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, I found them thoughtful, open and inclined to finish each other’s sentences. “Before we spoke to you today, I was actually thinking about the frustrations of doing meaningful interviews,” Welch told me. “Art is my way of connecting with the world; I have to do that to communicate because I’m not that good at expressing myself outside of the world. I try; I’m a pretty articulate person. What’s really going on here is hard for me to tell you — but it flows into the songs.”
Your new record is named after Woodland Studios in East Nashville, which you bought in 2002. Can you tell me a bit about your history there?
GILLIAN WELCH: We worked there with T Bone Burnett on our first record.
DAVID RAWLINGS: We were going to record the second record there, then T Bone was going to do it in California, at Sound City. But we had been in and out of the building so much that we discovered it was our favorite studio in town. When a tornado came through in the late ’90s and damaged the roof, there was a little dispute between the landlord and the studio owner. That ended up with the building being put up for sale. Then it was up for sale for a couple of years.
GW: Neil Young made “Comes a Time” there. The beginnings of Americana, before it was Americana – long before that. The first meeting of country, bluegrass and folk.
My admittedly speculative impression is that Woodland may be a bit of a sacred place – I realize that tornadoes and such things aren’t remotely romantic or sacramental, but there’s something almost eerie about their continued physical survival.
DR: Since 1900, to our knowledge, three tornadoes have passed through Nashville. And if you look at the map that shows their paths, you can see that they are practically on the same vector. They hardly cross each other. They are almost parallel lines. But if you look at where all three tornadoes crossed –
GW: It’s Five Points. It’s our studio. It’s literally at the intersection. Every time they come right over our studio.
What are your memories of the night of the 2020 tornado? It was just the two of you and your friend Glen Chausse, who stayed overnight at the studio.
GW: I remember an almost miraculous power and a sense of providence. I don’t know how we did it. It was very chaotic and very scary. I grew up in California and was used to huge wildfires. If you turn around, you see a whole hill in flames. But this was dark and confusing – 12,000 feet of darkness. We didn’t know how much of the building was damaged because we couldn’t see anything. It was the middle of the night and we knew water was starting to come through, so we kept moving stuff to a place we thought was safe. And when I say stuff, I mean So a lot of stuff. All our master tapes, all our guitars. Everything. Our entire musical life.
DR: I remember listening. A lot of my memories of that night are auditory: I heard the water as the upper parts of the ceiling started to collapse. It got worse and worse, more intense. We ran into different rooms and tried to assess the situation. I remember going into a room right in front of the tape vault, opening the door and the ceiling collapsed. Like, “OK – well, this is not good.”
GW: We thought a corner of the “A” room – where we ended up recording this record – was safe.
DR: It was an isolation cabin with its own ceiling. But three hours later the water had completely gone through. We had put all the instruments there. We had to move them again.
GW: It was a terrible feeling because it just kept getting worse.
DR: At the same time, we were incredibly lucky because if we hadn’t been in the city but on the road, we would have lost pretty much everything. We were able to be there; so many people never get that chance. We had to do so much calculation to figure out what to do next. I have an LED lamp and if it hadn’t been charged, I don’t know what we would have done.
GW: We had this LED light and three iPhones.
DR: We tried calling everyone we know and of course the phones didn’t work. You only realize how far away you are from technology every single day of your life when the power goes out.
GW: Communication breaks down and then there are three of you trying to save your life’s work alone.
DR: There are fifteen people who would have come by, but you can’t reach them and they don’t know what’s happening.
During the process – running in and out, grabbing tapes and guitars, dodging debris, getting soaked – was there a moment when you thought, “We’re going to kill ourselves”?
GW: I didn’t think about the danger to myself until after the fact, when people were saying, “Thank God you’re OK and you didn’t get beat up.” To be honest, it didn’t even cross my mind at the time. I was just thinking, “Keep moving the guitars, keep moving the bands.” I finally freaked out when the whole “A” room was under water and big chunks of the ceiling were falling down, and we had to get eight more guitar stands. We had them loaded on dollies and had to run this gauntlet through six inches of water in the hallway under falling sheets of water, as fast as we could. I was really panicking.
DR: I just kept thinking: Wow, it’s so interesting that this building has so many different ceilings!
It feels like all of this could be darkly productive—a lesson in how to keep going. That idea seems central to the new album—spiritually and lyrically.
DR: The truth is, we tried to tie it all together. We were already planning a reference to the tornado and the chaos. The working title of the project was “Empty Trainload of Sky.” But as we were nearing the end of the sequence, I remembered that I had spent fourteen to sixteen hours a day in that building for five years since the tornado. And so if there was anything that shaped the emotional content –
GW: It was Woodland. So much energy and effort and tears and sweat – and certainly a little blood – went into restoring it. We were so happy it wasn’t destroyed.
