O Gillian, Where Art Thou?

Sequestered deep in the concrete-bunkeresque bowels of the Grand Canal Theatre’s backstage area, Gillian Welch is talking in a low, intense whisper, a sweet lilt full of the same southern gothic cadences as her singing voice.

“We had written all these new songs but felt absolutely nothing towards them – nothing,” says the singer considered by many to be the first lady of alternative country. “Even if we played them live and people liked them, they didn’t ring true to us. If you feel empty doing it, what’s the point?”
She is discussing the torturously long delay that preceded her acclaimed 2011 LP, The Harrow And The Harvest. Having released six albums in a little over half a decade, in 2004 Welch and her musical partner Dave Rawlings were struck down with a strange sort of writer’s block. It wasn’t that they had lost the ability to compose. It’s just that, so far as they could tell, the new material didn’t pass muster. It didn’t feel like it mattered. Maybe they’d said all they needed to say. For a few scary months, they feared their careers might be at an end.
“Were we becoming perfectionist?,” muses Rawlings, an amiable chap who wears the largest stetson you’ve ever seen and, accent-wise, is a deadringer for movie star Owen Wilson. “I don’t know. I did worry we were demanding too much of ourselves. So I went back and listened to older material, stuff we hadn’t quite finished or hadn’t gotten around to releasing. And it sounded better. It just did. I don’t think it was a case of us losing sight of the wood from the trees.”
Somehow – and to this day they’re still not sure how – the pair managed to sweat and worry the mediocre streak out of their system (a break touring Rawling’s solo project helped). The results of all the turmoil, toil and soul-searching can be heard on The Harrow And The Harvest, the title a reference to the spells of creative famine and plenty that led up to the record’s completion.
Released a few months ago, it was immediately acclaimed as one of the finest of Welch’s career, a haunting synthesis of her old timey melodies and story-telling sensibilities. Several hours before a sell-out performance at the Grand Canal she admits to feeling gratified and surprised there was still an audience waiting around to listen to what she had to say.
“Somehow we hung around in people’s minds,” she says. “The prevailing sentiment is that the Harrow And The Harvest was worth the wait. However long it took, people were glad it arrived.”

As truly original artists often are, Welch (who pronounces Gillian with a hard ‘g’) is full of contradictions. Her accent is an hypnotic Deep South twang; listening to her songs, you are swept away to an America of dust-bowl towns and lonely swamp shacks, of sharecroppers with weathered brows and deep mysterious eyes. But she was actually born in New York and grew up in urban California, surely the least ‘authentically’ American place in the United States.
She and Rawlings met at college in Boston, bonding over their shared love of Hank Williams, Bill Monroe and The Stanley Brothers. After graduation they moved to Nashville, to be among the ghosts of the musicians they wished to emulate.
“You can’t turn around in Nashville without having something to do with Hank Williams hitting you in the face,” she laughs. “You feel the history of all of that to this day.”
Nashville, of course, is also seat of power of the corporate country industry, a juggernaut which has given the world such spur-booted mediocrities as Lady Antebellum, Sugarland and Toby Keith. As keepers of the flame, what’s it like to breathe the same air as the purveyors of such canon-defiling dross?
“The people who are in top 40 radio, you don’t really see them around Nashville so much,” Rawlings proffers. “The commercial country industry is a little bit of its own thing. If you are not in that world you might not notice it exists.”
As you would expect the shiny, commercial mainstream of country music isn’t quite to their taste. Still, Welch and Rawlings aren’t offended by its mere existence.
“The interesting thing about country is that it is always trying to chase the pop market. Country is perpetually 20 years behind pop. At the same time, you have people saying, ‘No, we need to stay true to these simple stories’. It’s pulling in two different directions and personally I think it’s cool it’s always been this way.”
Besides, chimes in Welch, many artists revered by purists today were dismissed as the Garth Brooks or Dixie Chicks of their day.
“Stuff that is deified now – in the ‘50s it was seen as smoothing out the older sounds and people hated it. I listen to music now that I didn’t like so much in the ‘80s, when it first came out, and I’m surprised at how traditional it sounds. Nashville is a complicated place.”
One thing they didn’t leave behind on the west coast was the liberal politics they espouse. Few states are as conservative as Tennessee. Does it sometimes feel they are breathing the same air as unreconstructed rednecks? Rawlings smiles: “I don’t think it’s good for anybody to live among people who all think the same way as you do. That can be a bad. If you are a liberal maybe it’s healthy to move to a place where you get along with conservatives. There are two sides to everything. It is very rare for someone to be flat out wrong about something they believe strongly in.”
Her own output aside, perhaps Welch’s biggest contribution to what she describes as ‘American acoustic music’ was co-producing the influential soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou in 2001. For the roots community O Brother Where Art Thou was nothing less than a year zero moment, when a style of music previously known only to aficionados was ushered into the mainstream. The lives of musician such as Ralph Stanley, the legendary figure credited with popularising bluegrass, were changed beyond recognition.
“I spent two years working on O Brother,” Welch recalls.” It was a pretty big chunk of time. And it had a pretty big impact. Back in the day, if you said you played American acoustic music, it sounded unfocused. I don’t think people could exactly call up what that sounded like. After O Brother, they’d be like, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard some of that kind of thing’. It was great way of introducing people to all this music I love. For us, it was like, ‘Dude, I told you this stuff was good’.”
Sitting forward she grins.
“And I’m glad Ralph Stanley made a lot of money. That man has devoted his life to music. After O Brother Where Art Thou came out, we visited him. He’d bought a white Jaguar for himself and a black Mercedes for his wife. They live on the top of a mountain and there they were, driving around in a Jag and a Merc. Like – good for you, Ralph.”

The Harrow And The Harvest is out now.