Dreaming A Highway

Thoughts On The Career Of Songwriter Gillian Welch

originally published November 29, 2006

The cat is hardly out of the bag regarding the steady arc of Gillian Welch’s unique status in the American songbook. Since 1996, she has released somebody’s bona fide favorite record every two and a half years. With a wheelbarrow full of Grammy nominations, all-star collaborations and soundtrack contributions, she still enjoys a quiet celebrity unshared by most colleagues of her stature. Perhaps a result of her obliquely demure demeanor, it only fuels the mystique compelled by the calm intensity of her presence onstage and on tape.

The catch with Welch falls where her historical context meets the breadth of her palette. In the decade since her first album, 1996’s Revival, was released, an ongoing proliferation of acoustic sensibility has blossomed throughout popular music. Call it the unplugged effect, and witness it everywhere from Uncle Tupelo to Outkast’s “Hey Ya,” from the resurgence of Neil Young to the moment Beck dropped that deliciously hokey slide loop that names “Loser.” Attribute it to a generation of musicians and music fans born in the late '60s and early '70s coming to roost in the fold of the radio of that era. They are the folks that brought you alt-country in its here-to-stay form. They are now the torchbearers of their own influences; in the South, this was often country music, with roots winding back to the Appalachian hills, before electricity, when there were only strings.

The smash success of the Coen Brothers' 2002 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and its accompanying soundtrack came as little surprise to diehard fans of old-timey and bluegrass music. Tucked into the folds of the soundtrack was a voice already known throughout the songwriter world, one that embodied the soul of longing, regret, sorrow and, ultimately, hope. By then, Welch was barely more than Nashville-famous, even with countless high-profile contributions on tributes to the likes of Gram Parsons, Kate Wolf and Pete Seeger; she had collaborations in the bag with Ani DiFranco, Allison Krauss and Ralph Stanley. Additionally, she and partner David Rawlings found time to act as Whiskeytown frontman Ryan Adams' backing band on his solo debut Heartbreaker. In the six years prior to O Brother, Welch had also churned out three discs of her own compositions - Revival, 1998’s Hell Among the Yearlings and 2001’s Time (The Revelator) - each too mystifyingly succinct with tradition to seem contemporary. 2003's Soul Journey continued the trend of creating albums that seemed unearthed, plow-hewn, found accidentally in a tree stump along some windy gap. When the world finally came around to Gillian Welch, her work stood openly prepared.

Adopted the day after her birth in 1967 by two Manhattan musicians who made their living writing for television and Broadway, Welch moved with her parents to Los Angeles after they secured a gig writing for "The Carol Burnett Show." She grew up around instruments and songbooks, and ostensibly started playing in bands as soon as she started college at U.C. Santa Cruz. After a cloistered musical childhood, the excess and freedom of college led to a spin out. Art and ceramic classes followed, and she moved into a house where a few folks played bluegrass, and the effect was electric. Pizza parlor gigs followed, but nothing about her said “pay any attention to me” at the time.

After the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, a shaken and restless Welch took a hiatus house-sitting in Wales before returning to the states for music instruction at The Berklee College of Music in Boston. There, in the hall waiting for an audition, she met David Rawlings, who would become her collaborator and partner. She stayed at Berklee for two years and majored in the just blossoming songwriting program. After realizing every album she’d ever loved came out of Nashville, she decided to hit the road and try her luck there before completing the degree. Rawlings joined her there some months later and the two began making the singer-songwriter rounds as a duo.

It wasn’t long before luck and persistence payed off. At the Bluebird Café in November 1993, she signed her first writing contract. Her first master session came in 1994 with Robert Earl Keen's “Gringo Honeymoon,” and a 1996 Starbucks compilation featured her song “Paper Wings.” Jerry Moss signed the two to Almo Records the same year and released Revival. By the time Hell Among the Yearlings was released in 1998, it was clear that Welch had spent a great deal of her years absorbing the traditions of musical Appalachia, and her songs have been performed and recorded by artists like Solomon Burke, Chris Thile and Jimmy Buffett.

Filtering those traditions through a narrative lens that focuses on a protagonist singing in first or second person, Welch’s songs convey the restlessness of the poor, the weary, the unlucky. David Rawlings’ delicate and nimble melodic accompaniment underscores her relentlessly accurate rhythmic strumming, and the effect is captivating. When the two share harmonies, it's a powerful and tonic blend of rustic noir.

Coy King

WHO: Gillian Welch
WHERE: Melting Point
WHEN: Thursday, November 30
HOW MUCH: $28