Album Review: Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, ‘Woodland’
In 2020, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings released an album of covers, For the Good Times, which won the 2021 Grammy for Best Folk Album. Their new album, Woodland, named for and recorded at Welch and Rawling’s own Woodland Studio in Nashville, is the duo’s first album of original songs since 2017’s Poor David’s Almanack.
The haunting minor chord chamber folk ballad “The Bells and the Birds” features Welch’s crystalline vocals floating along layers of ringing guitars that mimic ringing bells. The song blends the free jazz stylings and vocal flights resembling Joni Mitchell with the ethereal landscape of early British folk like Fairport Convention. The album opens with the duo’s swaying harmonies—with the drums mimicking the sounds of rolling along the rails—on “Empty Trainload of Sky.” Pedal steel and strains of B3 create an atmospheric sound that evokes the ways we move between darkness and light in our lives.
Soaring strings and transportive pedal steel ride beneath the transcendent “What We Had,” a ‘60s-flavored pop-inflected song (with sonic echoes of Neil Young’s “Lotta Love”) that probes the painfully sweet ambivalence of regret. “Lawman,” whose musical structure resembles Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home,” combines the blues with old-time sounds, while the gorgeous “North Country” unfolds slowly over a bed of pedal steel and reverberating guitar strumming and picking. Rawlings takes the lead vocal on the sparkling “Hashtag,” a meditation on identity. Woody Guthrie meets old-time front porch playing on “The Day the Mississippi Died,” which is destined to become a folk classic.
Entering Woodland is to embark on a journey through a sonically spacious soundscape filled with sparkling, spare guitar fingerpicking, transportive string arrangements, layered lyrics, and exalted harmonies.
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Woodland is available HERE
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