Front Page Reviews & AIR

The new official bio on Gillian Welch’s website is written by Colin Meloy of The Decemberists (with whom Welch collaborated on their latest album, The King is Dead).  The first thing Meloy tells us is to forget that it’s been eight years since Welch released an album, which is a hard thing to ask of someone like me who has been waiting that long for music from one of my favorite artists, especially since 2003’s Soul Journey was an uneven record that saw Welch experimenting with rock instrumentation and included only eight original songs out of ten.  It was really 2001’s Time (The Revelator) that I thought of when Welch’s name came up (which seemed to happen less frequently in the last few years). It was on that album that Welch and her musical partner, David Rawlings, had seemed on the precipice of creating a new kind of American music while letting us believe they were just throwback traditionalists.  That record featured just the two of them, playing the songs on acoustic instruments, live in the studio with no overdubs.  These two people seemed to have absorbed so much of the history of American music that it now just oozed out of them in new songs that sounded instantly timeless.  Unlike their first two albums, which featured expertly executed homages to the Gospel/Folk/Appalachian music of a hundred years ago, Time seemed to exist outside of time.  It had characters that came from anywhere and anytime, from present-day LA, to the Depression-era Dust Bowl, to Elvis Presley himself.  The most unique song, “April the 14^th Part I”, weaved the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the sinking of the Titanic into a sad story of a “two dollar show” where the hard-luck touring band won’t even “make half a tank of gas.”  The most mysterious element of the song is the narrator, who seems to be walking outside of time, perhaps seeing all the events at once (they all happened on April 14^th, different years), even stopping to note that the band was “strangely dressed.”  This feeling is culminated in the album’s 15-minute closer, “I Dream a Highway,” which is so mesmerizing that you never realize how much time has gone by.  Anyway, it was really Time (The Revelator) that made me eagerly anticipate what Welch and Rawlings might do after they got Soul Journey out of their system.  So it’s been ten years.

A funny thing happens when you put the proverbial needle down on The Harrow & The Harvest: those ten years do disappear.  It’s recorded the same way as much of Time, just Welch and Rawlings playing live with their guitars and their voices.  It is hard to explain the magic in this, and it’s only gotten better in the intervening years.  Rawlings’ guitar and vocal so perfectly go with Welch’s that it moves beyond the word “complimentary.”  You might say that Rawlings brings out something preternatural in Welch, and perhaps she does the same for him.  Either way, it’s something unspeakably special, and it’s the single most captivating thing about Harrow. 

However welcome the familiarity of the sound is, Harrow can’t help but suffer a bit because how of how easily it lends itself to comparisons to Time.  Only the sublime “The Way It Will Be” manages to evoke that same sort of outside-of-time feeling (interestingly, the song is almost as old as Time itself – Welch and Rawlings have been performing it live since 2003).  The rest of the album fails to deliver on the promise that Time seemed to carry – that promise of something wholly new and original crafted out of immersion in the old.  Instead, Welch and Rawlings deliver some of the best traditional songs of their career.  “Down Along the Dixie Line” is a tearjerker of a tale about a Southern soldier displaced by the Civil War, never to return home.  It’s every bit as heartfelt and un-contrived as classics like The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, which mines some of the same territory.  The real power of the song, however, comes simply from the fact that it is falling on our modern ears.  The narrator’s longing for home (the “ripe melons on the vine”, his “Mama and Pappy”) is something unfamiliar to us in a literal sense, but makes total sense on the visceral level.  And this is what’s so unique about the Welch/Rawlings brand of Americana – it is crafted for this exact purpose.  Unlike the traditional folk artists whose aim is to preserve the old songs, Welch and Rawlings seem to just be trying to remind us that there was something true about the old songs, and that maybe certain things will always be true, even as the times change.  On “Dixie Line”, they do this gently, but still profoundly.

Similarly, “Hard Times” – even with its farmer protagonist who sings to his mule and cow – seems directed right to the modern listener.  As Welch sings to the “Asheville boys” and the “Ragtime kids”, she’s really singing to us.  The message is universal, even if the farmer loses his mule and ends up down at the “cigarette store.”  The refrain never fails to stir emotion, because we’ve all been there.  We’ve all had hard times, even if they didn’t have to do with industrialization destroying farmers or the corporate music machine destroying the “old time noise.”  And each time she repeats, “Hard times ain’t gonna rule my mind”, I can feel the resolve inside me grow.  By the time she finishes defiantly with “no more”, I feel a little like my life has been ennobled.  And that’s saying a lot for a simple song played by just two people with a banjo, a guitar and their voices.  It’s the kind of intimate magic that can only be achieved in this way, which is something Welch and Rawlings understand better than anyone.

The entire album is worth listening to.  The opener, “Scarlet Town”, and “The Way That It Goes” are shuffling country dirges.  They might not be the most transcendent songs, but Rawlings’ playing makes them impossible to pass up as he weaves in and out of the melody and snakes his guitar lines around the chord changes like he has known the songs since the dawn of time.  “Dark Turn of Mind” is an almost Patsy-Cline-esque country ballad and “The Way the Whole Thing Ends” sounds like some kind of weird Appalachian porch ballad sung by someone who is very, very tired at the end of a very, very long day.  The strangest track is “Tennessee”, which is the least traditional-sounding, but tells the age-old tale of a good girl turned bad by the charms of the wrong kind of man (the cover image seems to cast Rawlings in that role, and you wonder whether it’s at least partially auto-biographical).

While The Harrow & The Harvest may not be Welch’s best album, it also doesn’t show any signs of the Welch/Rawlings duo losing their rare power.  Maybe they’ll never again quite reach the timelessness of Time (The Revelator) – but, then again, maybe they will.  The kind of music they create is not confined to the young.  Either way, I know that as long as they keep playing, I’ll be listening.