Well, no, I didn't buy myself two pieces of notepaper covered in Sharpie, not exactly. For many years now, how many I don't remember, I've been a fan of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, a married songwriting team writing modern old-time bluegrass, recording and touring under her name (apart from one album and tour in 2009, of an alt-country style, under his name). Their fourth album, Soul Journey, came out in June 2003 and I can remember listening to it often during August of that year, as I traveled back and forth up the mountain to Buttered Biscuit. Once I almost went off the side of the twisty, turn-filled road because I was listening to "I Made a Lover's Prayer" perhaps a little too intently. That's the effect the quality of their music has on me, an urgency of needing to stop and listen and strain to hear a still, small voice coming through that raw plainsong and that 1935 Epiphone guitar. It's been a long time since they graced us with new music, 8 years to be exact. In June of this year their fifth album, The Harrow and the Harvest, was released, and unless something quite surprising happens in the next two months, it will be #1 on my top 5 albums from the second half of 2011.For a few years I've been on the official Gillian Welch email list, but concerts have been sporadic and on the West Coast or in Nashville. The side album released in Dave Rawlings' name which had a full tour in spring 2010, which I was able to catch, but it wasn't the real experience of a Gillian Welch show as the music was simply different and the old tunes weren't played. But this time around, there's a tour spanning four months and covering the U.S. plus the Netherlands, Germany, France, and the British Isles. Kindly providing their email list with a pre-sale password, I was able to grab two 3rd row tickets for myself and a friend a few months in advance; the show itself was to be four days before my birthday.
So of course you now realize what the picture above is: it's their setlist for the night. Posted on Fanity along with setlists for most of the shows during the tour, it documents two hours of happiness in my life. From the third row we could see the glances they gave each other when an audience member shouted out a song request they weren't particularly interested in, the raised eyebrows when a guitar absolutely refused to get into proper tuning before a song, the different sizes of picks Rawlings was using on his Epiphone, and the way they didn't need to look at each other at all to sing harmonies and improvise bars of material in the middle of songs or when they extended a couple of tracks another minute or more past the recorded versions.
Starting with the song from their debut album which brought them instant acclaim, "Orphan Girl" sent up applause from all corners of the packed theater. Then 15 years vanished in an instant as they transitioned to "Scarlet Town," the opening track of the new album, and added an extra 16 bars to the end. "Dark Turn of Mind," the new album's second track and a personal favorite, followed. It ends with the lines: "Some girls are bright as the morning/and some girls are blessed/ with a dark turn of mind." "One Morning" was next; a song narrated by an old woman at the end of the Civil War, it's a musically and lyrically jarring, jangled song as she sees her son on his horse, coming back through the fields and under the willows, dying from his wounds. This got an extended ending as well. As if sensing the mood was too somber, a change in the set was made on the fly (they do that a lot) and next we were given the upbeat "I Want to Sing That Rock 'n Roll." But of course we can't have two happy songs in a row (partly because they just don't have too many of them), and the groove-oriented, pleasantly wistful "Wayside/Back in Time" was moved to after the "new" track "The Way It Will Be." I'll have more to say about this song when I review the new album, but let it suffice to say now that this mind-blowing, incredible piece, kicking around in live sets since at least 2004, was the highlight of the show for me, the words fragile and the guitars brash, as it's also the highlight of the new album.
Up next came the new album's first single, "The Way It Goes," a subtly devastating song about the way we live in these troubled times, encapsulated in uptempo riffs and pop harmonies with two almost joyful guitar solos mixed in. The set slowed back down with another change; instead of getting the addiction ballad "My Morphine" from 1998, we went straight into a new introspective piece, "Tennessee." To close out the set, they must have figured we need another upbeat, fun tune, so instead of a cover version of "Dusty Boxcar Wall" (a song not upbeat or fun in any way) we got an old favorite from 2001, "Red Clay Halo," about a farm boy who is covered in dirt from his chores and so the girls won't dance with him. That's okay, though: "But when I pass through the pearly gates/my crown will be gold instead./Or just a red clay robe/with red clay wings/and a red clay halo for my head."
After a brief intermission, the second set began with what might be my second-favorite track on the new record, "Hard Times." I resist writing much about the new songs because I want to save that for the eventual review, but seeing the live performance was a special thing because it started with Gillian alone, just her voice and banjo for the first verse and chorus, David stepping in with his guitar more than a full minute into the song. It was hushed and plaintive, and intimate in the way only live music can be. Another quiet tune from the new album, "Down Along the Dixie Line," followed, and then the crowd-pleaser "Elvis Presley Blues," one of the standout tracks from their 2001 album, and one of their most lyrically expressive songs with lines about Elvis like "Just a country boy, he combed his hair/put on a shirt his mother made and went on the air/and he shook it like a chorus girl/shook it like a Harlem queen/shook it like a midnight rambler, baby, like you never seen" and "How he took it all out of black and white/grabbed everyone in other hand, and held on tight/and he shook it like a hurricane/shook it like to make it break/shook it like a holy roller with his soul at stake." The fun continued with an inventive arrangement for the new track "Six White Horses," which is of course about death coming for us all, involving guitar, harmonica, voices, handclaps, and step-dancing. Seemed quite appropriate.
At the three-quarter mark in every Gillian Welch show for over a decade now sits the song that, it seems, Gillian and David have declared as their magnum opus, a brilliantly written and structured track called "Revelator" which gave their third album its name. I love how, on the setlist, where most every other song gets one word of its title or its initials written, the clipped "REV" is all that serves to signify the tune. It seems like the setlist was made in its entirely, and then the song was dropped in, as if so essential, it's assumed during setlist creation and earmarked once the songs are counted and the 3/4ths place is calculated. Starting off bold and then meandering in its middle, its lyrics swoop and dive like birds, barely stringing together contrasting images and the threads of a plot long lost, the two guitars meshing in sync before a closing section where Gillian holds a minor key rhythm line while David riffs on top, crashing and thrashing, alternating between sharp, intricate notes and violently raw repeated phrases, ending at perhaps the most sour chord progression ever, as if you've been screamed at and now your antagonist, drained and half-conscious, slumps to the floor. The song is a masterpiece, and a live experience that left my hands tingling from how much I'd unconsciously been tensing them.
The crowd was wild and applauded for a long time, and Gillian and David took a moment to play with the setlist yet again. After a while Gillian came back to her mic to say "well, I suppose I'll have my partner sing one," and we were treated to "I Hear Them All," a gentle track from their side project in '09, which morphed into a rousing version of "This Land is Your Land," complete with audience participation. The sad ballad "Everything is Free" was replaced by the equally sad ballad "Annabelle," a surprise but a welcome one, since the latter song was only the second they'd played from their first album 15 years ago. "Annabelle" chronicles the death of a loved daughter. Probably figuring that was enough death and dying for the end of the set, they replaced the rape-and-murder song "Caleb Meyer" with "Look at Miss Ohio," the anthemic track which kicks off their fourth album and tells the rather Augustinian story of a gal who's "running around with the ragtop down./She says 'I wanna do right, but not right now.'" As we gave them a standing ovation, they left and returned to the stage for another new song, "The Way the Whole Thing Ends." It wasn't quite the end, however, as they chose a pair of cover songs to finish off the show, first a song they've been singing since the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack came out in 2000, "I'll Fly Away," and then a brand new cover for this tour, a powerful rendition of Jefferson Airplane's classic "White Rabbit" which brought us all to our feet once again.
Yup, I'm a firm believer in buying myself presents. I always have the most fun with them. After the tour goes through continental Europe and Great Britain in November, they stop at a theater a paltry three hours from Bluebell Town at the end of the month. Guess who just bought himself a ticket?
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