The world of Gillian Welch is a far cry from all the cheap glitz and ego-maniacal power mongering of the U.S.A. of Bill Clinton's impeachment, Hollywood and rockets to space. It's the other side of those who coin.

Welch explores the grey, rural underbelly and she lives and breathes the country blues music she uses to tell her stories. A 'blue-collared' soul sister of Iris Dement and Lucinda Williams, at times her sound could have come straight out of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The people of her songs are those of the by-roads and back-lanes that time has forgotten. She's truly Country American but it doesn't take too big a leap of the imagination to jump from there to our own inner-city squalor, when she sings of the man who has lost his woman to heroin on 'My Morphine'.