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Twenty years ago, Gillian Welch was an unknown songwriter, still in her 20s, playing acoustic sets around Nashville with her guitarist boyfriend. The two had recently graduated from Berklee College of Music, where they had bonded over a love of the Sta... -
As album-closing songs go, they don’t get much more epic than “I Dream A Highway,” the 14-and-a-half minute track that ends Gillian Welch’s 2001 album Time (The Revelator.) It’s a track that’s memorable for far more ... -
Gillian Welch’s friends thought she had become the victim of some kind of scam when she told them she was going to play a thousand-person audience festival at Cloverleaf Farm outside of Athens, Ga. They thought it was too good to be true. Wildwoo... -
Gillian Welch, the Los Angeles-raised musician, whose lyrics and voice conjure Appalachian hollows, Dust Bowl highways, and Nashville morphine dens, released her first album, “Revival,” twenty years ago. Several of the songs sounded as ... -
Back in September I accompanied 33 of my college seminarians to Washington, DC to be with Pope Francis. It wasn’t a vacation. It was a pilgrimage.
A vacation is supposed to be comfortable, predictable, controllable, restful, and pleasant. A pilg... -
Over the past two decades David Rawlings and Gillian Welch have gained a huge following in the worlds of folk and Americana music. Their sparse instrumentation blends perfectly with soulful voices that deliver expertly crafted lyrics in a way that is e... -
Exploring the Hazy American Landscape of Welch’s Best Album
I.
So there you stand, ready for the end of the world. The End of All Time. That promised moment of revelation and release. (Promised by whom? All sorts of preachers, two-bit prophets,... -
Was there a feeling, a character or an event in particular that inspired your new record, The Harrow and the Harvest?There definitely are some themes on it that deal with the passage of time, and reversals, and changes, and what happens to human relati... -
In the second week of May, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings drove from Los Angeles to Nashville. The journey took 31 hours, and Welch filmed a small portion of it on her iPhone. The clip is framed by an open car window, and outside you can see the floo... -
How long has it been since Gillian Welch put out a new album? If you’ve stumbled across even a glancing reference to The Harrow & The Harvest, you know the album arrived eight years after its predecessor, 2003’s Soul Journey. To put thi...