Q&A: Gillian Welch

(Credit: Mark Seliger)

Gillian Welch is a band, one that features Gillian Welch on vocals and guitar and partner Dave Rawlings on guitar, and that is how Gillian Welch has worked for years.

It's the honey voice of Welch that usually first pulls listeners into the duo's spare, warm songs. But nearly two decades into a friendship forged at the Berklee College of Music over a shared love of very old music, Welch and Rawlings have evolved into an extraordinary duet machine, one that blends crackling acoustic music, Appalachian folk traditions and bluegrass into an effortlessly rich rural sound.

Such synergy is hard to maintain in real life and harder to maintain in music (we're still not entirely sure if Simon and Garfunkel like each other). But part of Welch and Rawlings' persistence as a duo comes their perfectionism and pragmatism. "We're perfectionists of a certain stripe," she says. "We'll take all kinds of haphazard and accidental things in recording, but with the songwriting I feel like we inhabit this really sparse, almost puritanical world, and there just isn't very much that fits in that world."

In fact, that perfectionism, Welch says, is responsible for the eight-year layoff between the dark new Gillian Welch album, "The Harrow and the Harvest," and its predecessor, 2003's "Soul Journey." The duo didn't spent those years on vacation, or engaged in any form of self-destruction or Important Life Matters like having babies. Welch and Rawlings worked throughout, writing and recording nearly two or three albums' worth of material. It's just, Welch says, that the material wasn't up to par.

"It's weird, but we tried to ignore our instincts a number of times and just say, 'This is crazy! These songs are good enough!'" she says. "This is what kept happening over the eight-year span. And every time we tried to fool ourselves into thinking we liked the songs when we didn't, we just ended up miserable."

The writing didn't pick back up, Welch says, until the two began work on a project in Rawlings' name: the 2009 debut by the Dave Rawlings Machine, "A Friend of a Friend."

Metromix talked to Welch as she strolled the streets of Portland, Ore., on an early stop on the tour behind "The Harrow and the Harvest," which will take the duo all over the country for most of the rest of 2011.

When did you first notice the record crystallizing?
I feel like we started to get our writing groove back writing Dave's record, and it really started to feel like a record after we toured it. We're very cagey. We err on the realistic, pessimistic side. I never think we have a record until we're like 80 to 90 percent there. So it was October when we really had the final writing push that's the bulk of the record. Whatever we'd been waiting for—some sort of third gear to be reached, some sort of highway gear—that's when we hit it.

I honestly think it was just disgust. We were just finally so disgusted that we didn't have a record's worth of songs, that we just finally did it.

It's a little hard to process, from the outside, that Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings were writing songs that weren't very good.
I feel like each song we manage to sign off on is like its own magic trick, this crazy balancing act between self-confession, self-expression, traditionalism, modernism, classicism. And if we don't have all those flavors in there, we don't like it. If it's too traditional, we don't like it. If it's too confessional, we don't like it. If it's too rock, too country? We don't like it. So this is the first batch that we finally liked. We like these songs!

It seems like a lot of people like these songs!
Yeah! I'm really pleased that other people like them too. One of the things I like about them is that they fit together as a group. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find another act who's more album-oriented.

The balance you mention—not too country, not too rock and so forth—seems a difficult one to strike in songs that are so stark and spare. When you're in that evaluation process, can you listen to a song and go, "Nope," right off the bat, or do you have to live with it for a few days or weeks?
It's a little bit of both. In our world, Dave is the quicker, more mercurial and the more facile. I tend to arrive at these things a little later, a little more slowly, but sort of like a mountain moving. [Laughs] Once I move I stay there, very steadfast. It's like my brain is always working on the answers, but it takes a while for them to come to the surface, whereas with Dave, they just explode like fireworks.

The nice thing is we never argue. We're incredibly like-minded, which is the only reason we're able to do this. It is a very peculiar balancing act. It's just weird. We have this weird aesthetic, and almost everything is a veto. Our constant struggle is to just have something that we don't hate. But it puts this strange twist on what we do. It's not unusual for me to meet people who basically listen to hard rock or punk and they'll say, "I always hated acoustic and folk music until I heard you guys."

When that happens, where do people connect with your music? Do you get a sense of where they come from, how they find you?
It's very telling to me that with our new record, this well-known [heavy] metal artist named John Baizley did the cover. And before he did the cover we were still in the studio so I had no music to send him, so I sent him the lyrics. This guy who normally does hardcore metal bands, and he read the lyrics and calls me and basically says, "This s--- is f---ing dark." I'm like, "Yeah! I know!" Our stuff is kind of gnarly, but I think it's also really pretty! We work really hard to record acoustic guitars with the respect they deserve. And so I like to think that the music is really beautiful-sounding, and then it's got this dark, gnarly edge. I think that's part of the reason that it works for different people. I don't really know! I'm just glad that it does.