Gillian Welch and David Rawlings on How Natural Disasters Affected Their New Album, ‘Woodland’: ‘I’m Undaunted by Life’s Destructive Moments… I’m More Perplexed by the Happy Times’
variety.comChris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are not the first musicians ever to name an album after a favorite studio or, in their case, the one they own and operate in East Nashville.
But “Woodland” isn’t just a random title — it really does reflect the hardships and triumphs that came about over the last few years at the recording facility of the same name, which had its roof blasted off in the famous Tennessee tornado of 2020, right before lockdown made everything still more difficult.
With that adversity as a backdrop for their new material, the wish that hard times would come again no more is as deeply rooted in these 10 songs as it was in the four-year rebuilding process for the studio where much of the acclaimed roots music of the last quarter-century has gone down. “Woodland” is the first album of new studio material released jointly under both Welch’s and Rawling’s name, although that fact could nearly go unnoticed, since they’ve been co-billed out on the road for decades at this point, and fans know that each record by any of them up to this point has been deeply collaborative.
Those devotees haven’t been starved for material, since the two of them did make a Grammy-winning covers album together during the pandemic, and retrospective projects covering the eras dating back to Welch’s breakthrough in 1993 with the T Bone Burnett-produced “Revival” have filled any gaps, along with jointly recorded releases under Rawlings’ band moniker.
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