More Songs About Death And Botany

Smack dab in the centre of the marketplace we have Madonna manufacturing poses, selling millions of discs, being nominated for a Grammy and still, basically, dominating pop. Meanwhile, standing on the fringes of the music industry we have a real maverick artist like Gillian Welch.

Sure, she too was nominated for a Grammy but her 1996 debut album Revival didn't win the Best Contemporary Folk Album category even though it just may have been the finest collection of American folk songs released in the past five years. New folk songs. True folk songs. Music that has one eye on the morphine needle in the hand of Hank Williams, the sign-of-the-cross being made by the Carter Family and the murder ballads brought to the Appalachian mountains by Irish and British settlers, but also music so modern it looks back from the 21st century. It is that timeless.

Indeed, in Nanci Griffith's Other Voices: A Personal History of Folk Music (by Nanci Griffith and Joe Jackson, Heartland Press), Griffith sets Welch, Iris DeMent and Jack Ingram in a sacred space diametrically opposed to New Country acts like Faith Hill, who, arguably, have severed the bloodline back to the likes of Jimmie Rodgers. Nanci says: "The bulk of what I hear these days, in this area, is not New Country. Anyone who has heard Gillian's album, Revival, and listened to the lyrics of 'Orphan Girl' knows that she is writing and playing country music." Not surprisingly, Gillian is one of the cast of thousands doing backing vocals on "The Hammer Song", the closing track from Nanci's latest album Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back To Bountiful).

Emmylou Harris must feel similarly inclined towards Gillian and her music, given that it was Emmylou's cover of "Orphan Girl" on the 1995 Wrecking Ball album that probably paved a path to the release of Revival. But, before that, Gillian had paid her own musical dues, performing as opening act for troubadours such as Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, and, most importantly of all, headlining with the man she introduces as her partner, guitarist and fellow composer David Rawlings.

In fact, their form of musical marriage, from the subject matter they address in songs through to the harmonies they sing and the overall sound they create, hooks the duo straight into a lineage that also takes them back to acts like The Carter Family and the brothers, Louvin and Stanley. It's no surprise then that, not long after this interview begins, in a dressing room backstage at Dublin's snazzy new venue, Vicar Street, David joins in. Gillian's final words, as I leave are: "As you can see, David loves to talk!" He sure does. But, to begin, Gillian, alone.

"It's very nice when people like Nanci say things like that about the music," she says. "And what David and I do is pretty much far removed from what people do call New Country these days. But I don't hold our music up as an antidote or as the antithesis of that other stuff. What we do is motivated by what we love! This is the kind of music that David and I really dig! So this is what we do!"

Listening to one track from the new Mercury 10-CD The Complete Hank Williams, with Hank and Anita Carter singing "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still In Love With You)", one certainly hears a pretty pointed precursor of the sound made by Gillian and Rawlings. This, too, is the lineage they are extending.

"I've listened to a ton of that stuff and that's the root of what we are doing," she enthuses, growing noticeably green-with-envy at the mention of the Williams box set. "But, hopefully, I do something beyond that. For one thing, the songs are new, they never existed before so there's always that crucial difference, to begin with. But what it is, exactly, about that original music that gets me so much, really is hard to talk about. There are so many aspects of it that the first time I heard it I found such music incredibly satisfying. It really resounded with me. What is it? The overall sound of the voices, the general timbre of the people who sing this kind of stuff. It's not overly pretty. You don't hear a lot of vibrato. There's something almost piercing about it. The harmonies are beautiful but, again, not overly pretty. You get dissonance in there. Especially in the two-part brother singing. Like the Stanley Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, the Monroe Brothers."

This dissonance really isn't that different from what one hears in the work of rock writers like, say, PJ Harvey.

"Well, rock music sprang from that dissonance," Gillian responds.

Likewise, the way Dwight Yoakam works with guitarist Pete Anderson, mixing bluegrass with honky tonk, rockabilly and rock 'n' roll, surely?

"Absolutely. And I see David and I as very connected to, say, what Dwight is doing with Pete. We just went in a more stripped-down, acoustic vein, pretty dark too. Though Dwight also is dark. We're all just different offshoots, different configurations of the same stuff."

That said, when it comes to the darkness at the soul of the music made by Gillian and David there are those critics who claim their songs are without hope, that Revival, for example, focused mostly on characters teetering on the edge of the abyss.

"They are not without hope," Gillian interjects, forcefully.

But couldn't it be said that the element of optimism comes more from the music, than the sense of defiance in Gillian's voice, the ascending song structures and those harmonies that come from the world of spirituals? Isn't there often a distinct tension between the relatively bleak words Welch sings and their sonic surroundings?

"That dynamic is me, to a certain extent," she reflects. "That's my outlook coming through, in the music. And this is another aspect of the music I love cropping up in what we do. What you describe is a common thread through a lot of folk ballads. These people singing these songs, as in Ralph Stanley and all those guys, were pretty tough. Really tough. Bill Monroe certainly was. So that's in there, part of the heritage, central to the music. No matter how mournful the words are the overall sense coming through is one of strength and defiance."

What about, say, "Tear My Stillhouse Down" which is sung from the point of view of a dying whiskey bootlegger?

"Well, what else are you going to sing about? If not death?"

Lots of options, surely.

"But nothing is as much fun!" Gillian jokes, neatly crystallising the real dynamic at the soul of their music. "And I bumped into a guy in North Carolina who had seen a bunch of our shows and he'd been thinking about our songs and he came up to me and said, 'Okay, I boiled it down. All of your material falls into two categories. Death and botany!'"

Is Gillian sure that guy wasn't thinking of "Paper Roses" rather than her own song "Paper Wings" which, incidentally, has been described as a Patsy Cline outtake?

"Maybe he was!" she says. "But this comparison has come up before. Man, I wasn't trying to be Patsy Cline. I was trying to be Willie Nelson! I got this great box-set, all the early stuff. And it was in my CD player for weeks and weeks and weeks and that's what 'Paper Wings' came out of! I had country shuffles coming out of my ears, y'know?"

Whatever about the country shuffles, Gillian, as with Willie, sure can be a killer when it comes to country/folk couplets. How's this, from "Barroom Girls": "Oh the night came undone like a party dress/And fell at her feet in a beautiful mess." So, would it be wrong to assume that this lyric is, well, David's?

"It's mine!" Gillian laughs. "And the real influence on stuff like that—apart from every book I've ever read!—would be Townes Van Zandt. Certainly as far as songwriters go."

But why? Is it his poetic precision, picking up on those quirky details that tell all?

"He is quirky. Dave and I describe that as when a lyric is good, but sort of illogical. We call it peculiar. If you can get, in a song, something that is good and right but you didn't see it coming or it seems to hint at this whole other thing, that is the beauty of a great lyric, to me. Of course, it's also the beauty of poetry."

What about contemporary songwriters? Is there anyone out there who similarly surprises Gillian Welch?

"I don't listen to that many, if any, contemporary people. Almost everybody I listen to is dead! There's so much good, old stuff out there that I can't take time to be sorting through contemporary music. Though, I like Beck. He has that peculiar thing in his songs. Apart from that I don't listen to much of the newer music."

Gillian Welch admits that fans and critics who listen to her new music sometimes have many interpretations of that bear little resemblance to the writer's intentions. For example, if someone were to conclude that "I'm Not Afraid To Die" on her new album Hell Among The Yearlings reflected Gillian's own religious beliefs would this be right or wrong?

"Wrong!" she says laughing. "Though that is what people think! But as for this whole religious question, which does come up time and time again, the point is that my whole relationship to religion is musical. It's the gospel music more than the religion."

As in what? The celebratory nature of gospel music irrespective of who the God is?

"Sort of, yeah. But I couldn't sing the music if I didn't believe it on a certain level. And, once again, people wonder why the devil and God and all this stuff turns up in the songs. It turns up because, as I said earlier, what else are you going to talk about!"

Maybe if Gillian listened to a thousand pop acts she'd get the answer to that question. Like Spice Girls.

"No thank you!" she laughs. "But if we're talking about where my music comes from, I'm just not going to talk about 'he's so fly'! The subject matter on my album is the subject matter that intrigues and fascinates me, so that's what I'm going to write about and sing about."

So, presumably, fans should not take from the various songs on Hell Among The Yearlings any notion that she has walked the streets as a prostitute, takes morphine and is going to kill herself—but it doesn't matter because she knows she'll meet God?

"They shouldn't be that literal! But are all the songs true? Yeah. Depends on how you look at them."

So does Gillian do much morphine?

"No!" she says, suddenly pausing.

Does she do morphine at all?

"I don't know if I should answer that," she laughs.

But does Gillian, as a black romantic, believe in psychic disordering of the senses through drugs and drink, just to see what happens, to feed the muse?

"To that end, what I took up was the banjo!" she responds. "And I am being serious. Not that it upsets the senses but it soothes the senses in that it is so hypnotic. Very deconstructivist! I don't even play chord changes when I play the banjo. It's very modal. It's a drone instrument and that had a huge effect upon the whole colour and theme of the new record. Because a bunch of these songs were written on banjo, even if the songs didn't stay there, in the final arrangement."

But do fans, when they listen to songs like "My Morphine" or "Whiskey Girl", read them as reflecting a straight line back to Gillian's life?

"Of all the questions, the one that comes up most often is the religious question. And I don't really like to talk about that stuff all that much. Or these other areas. I'm a songwriter."

But isn't there a danger that Gillian could be alienating at least some listeners, in this post-religious age, by even seeming to be hooked into some form of Christian revivalist context?

"That doesn't happen," she retorts. "And anyone who draws that kind of conclusion from my music isn't really listening, because I don't come from that angle at all. I've never been a churchgoer! Like I said before, it's all from the heart, from the background of music Dave and I love. That more than anything else. It's from the culture and the emotions of the music. And my own emotional reaction to things. That's it. It's got nothing to do with Christian fundamentalism, or anything like it. Though when we do 'By The Mark' on stage I do get that old good-time-religious-feeling sometimes. It's a very uplifting song for us to play but, as I say, it's more because we are tapping into a very deep well, musically, rather than anything else. Neither Dave nor myself are very religious people. We're not areligious or atheists but we certainly couldn't be seen as Christian fundamentalists."

Has Nashville, still home of the Grand Ol' Opry, ever tried to appropriate what they might see as Gillian's Christian songs?

"In fact, a couple of people know 'By The Mark' and another act wanted to play it on a Nashville show and they were banned from doing so by the establishment. They said they didn't want 'that kind of gospel'—which is a comment I've never fully understood."

"That was what the Opry said?" David interjects, having walked back into the room.

"Yeah," says Gillian. "All I can assume is that it wasn't joyful, happy, smiley gospel, or whatever."

"But then other times we've had people say 'don't play "My Morphine" because it talks about drugs' so who knows what kind of censorship is in operation?" says David.

"Well there was one DJ who was playing Revival and she got canned!" Gillian interrupts. "So who can tell? That was a country station. But then we wouldn't get any real support from country radio in America. We're more alternative. David may not feel this way, but I do, that we are marginalised. But we're both firm believers in the fact that if you make music of worth it will be undeniable and get played. Somewhere. It will find its audience. That's what's happening with Hell Among The Yearlings. Yes, we could have put drums and bass on the whole record and given country radio programme planners way more to consider, play. But who cares? Doing that to these songs would have been totally wrong. That wasn't what these songs are about, at all. It would have been a totally hollow gesture. And that's the very opposite of what David and I are all about. As in creating music simply to make it a commercial venture."

Certainly, there's no denying that Gillian Welch and David Rawlings create songs that are chillingly intimate, contemplative, poetic.

"We really get off on the details of stuff," says Gillian. "We'd probably be a bigger pop act if we were more interested in the grosser, larger picture. But we're not. For whatever reasons. Maybe it's a matter of taste. But, as I say, people who want to find our music will find it. And what's better is that I really do believe they will connect with it in a way that people tend not to when they hear, say, pop songs on the radio. You're right about the element of intimacy that defines our work—wherever it comes from! At the end of the day, I wouldn't want to sacrifice that intimacy for pop success. Whatever we lose in terms of, say, radio play, we gain by knowing that when someone puts on Revival or Hell Among The Yearlings at home they go, 'this is a totally different world. A totally different soundscape. More intimate, airy, earthy, spooky, dark and focusing on death—all the things we think about but don't always talk about!'"