After the destruction of their Woodland Studios in the Nashville tornado of 2020, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings salvaged what they could of their past and soon began rebuilding. The result is this first recording of original music for many years. In a recent interview with Mojo magazine, Welch said of the album, ‘There is a renewal, but with stories and scars. I feel like a new shoot, tender…’ Woodland has that same fragility, reckoning with the darkness and light of midlife, finding hope in new growth.
Empty Trainload of Sky was inspired by a walk around her East Nashville neighbourhood, where Welch caught a glimpse of sky through a passing train. Taking the image back home she has written a classic, Americana vista. After all who hasn’t wanted to hitch a ride on a train anywhere out of their own life? Or looked at the expansive sky and wondered what the hell it all means? The song becomes more than just a moment in time – in the echoing of ‘hey hey my my’ she nods to Neil Young, who once recorded Comes a Time at Woodland Studios, and sounds like she’s pondering what it means to be a songwriter too.
The mournful lament for the past, What We Had is a reminder of how beautifully interwoven Gillian and David’s voices, and musical lives, have become. The past calls to them but they can never return.
Lawman is an old song, concerning the inevitable consequences of life, things that you can’t escape, no matter how hard you try. The guitar picking adds an eerie refrain to their story. While the tornado is never mentioned explicitly on the album, this song feels like an acknowledgment of such disasters that are part of the disturbing nature of the world.
The Bells and the Birds continues in a similarly musically experimental vein, with warring guitar parts, echoed in the lyrics ‘some hear a song and some hear a warning’. The inventiveness of their textures remain unmatched.
Inspired by a chance meeting with their hero Guy Clark, ‘Hashtag’ muses on the idea of artistic legacy and what is left behind by those artists who are ‘only news when we die’. The word ‘hashtag’ seems to out of place on a folk album like this and yet their most famous song ‘Everything is Free’ is about the impact of the digital world, so it seems fitting to have another song that sums up the horror of being reduced to nothing by the internet. The song itself, sung by David with Gillian lifting him up on the chorus, is poignant and devastating and just one of the best things they’ve ever recorded. Guy’s boots might be big ones to fill, but Jesus Christ, these two are giving it all they have.
Gillian’s lead vocals on North Country, The Day the Mississippi Died and Here Stands a Woman are softly stunning. The latter is a song about aging, about the loss of childhood, about seeing someone in the mirror who you don’t recognise. Yet when she sings ‘Here stands a woman’ she sounds confident, accepting, happy. When you no longer recognise yourself, there’s unexpected freedom there.
The album ends with Howdy Howdy, a duet with simple banjo accompaniment that asks the question about how to stay together for such a long time, how to find yourself within another. If there’s some uncertainty about the future here, that’s only to be expected after all the ‘rain’ they’ve been through.
On Woodland something beautiful has bloomed out of the inevitable wreckage of this world.
BUY: https://gillianwelch.bandcamp.com/album/woodland
Interview Links
GQ with Jason Isbell: https://www.gq.com/story/gillian-welch-and-david-rawlings-talk-to-jason-isbell
Performing ‘Hashtag’ at Newport Folk Festival:
Highway Queens 
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