it feels almost cruel to reminisce about the
power of live music. But if, in some before time,
you were lucky enough to see Gillian Welch and
David Rawlings live, you most likely experienced
the feeling of home coming that two performers
who genuinely love being onstage together can
bestow on an eager audience.
Welch and Rawlings have been singing togeth-
er since the early ’90s, and onstage, each can
discern what the other needs with just a quick
exchange of glances or the tap of a foot. That level
of trust extends outward, drawing the audience
into a tight circle of intimacy. Welch sings with
her entire face — when a song bends toward joy,
she almost can’t help smiling, and when a song
bends toward sorrow, she looks contemplative,
sometimes heartbroken, sometimes resigned to
whatever the song’s fate may be. But her voice
is consistent and clear, always. It resonates in
the heart fi rst: She sings as though she’s either
mourning or preparing to mourn. Rawlings is
the more animated of the two — he’s tall and
athletic and energized. When he plays his guitar,
his entire upper body twists and turns in small
but ferocious movements. Their combined voices
operate beyond simple sonic harmony. There are
emotional inquiries at play. If Welch’s voice deliv-
ers the good news or the hard news of the world,
Rawlings’s voice comes underneath, asking how
much deeper the sadness can go or what fresh
heights the ecstatic can climb to.
I saw them in Virginia in the fall of 2018 at an out-
door show that was intermittently stormy. A crowd
of a few hundred people descended on a wide fi eld,
our feet sinking into the muddy grass. About half-
way into their set, they gave a performance of the
song ‘‘Hard Times’’ that has been worked into my
memory. The tune is, on its surface, about over-
coming the world’s ills — a man plows and sings
to his mule, until he stops plowing and one day the
mule is gone. It’s a patient and heartbreaking song,
fi ltered through a vague but believable promise
of something better. Especially when played live,
it feels as if you’re nursing an open wound that is
slowly stitching itself closed, inch by inch.
As they sang, the rain started to fall, and the
audience gathered closer to one another while
the mud rose around us. Welch handled the fi rst
two-thirds of ‘‘Hard Times’’ on her own, pick-
ing along on a banjo, laying out the facts of the
landscape and the characters upon it. Rawlings
stood slightly behind her, swaying silently, maybe
plucking a guitar string or two. He showed an
almost visible restraint, vibrating with anticipa-
tion. Then Welch’s line ‘‘We all get to heaven in
our own sweet time’’ seemed to activate Rawl-
ings, transforming the song from a distant but
touchable story into immediate instructions for
a listener who might be ruled by some anguish
and looking to get free.
When they hit the line ‘‘And kick ’til the dust
comes up from the cracks in the fl oor,’’ they lifted
their feet simultaneously on the word ‘‘up’’ and
instinctively brought them down at the same
time. That is the magic of their performance,
making the small moments romantic. They sing
as though they’re letting you in on a secret that
might not save your life forever but will defi nitely
save it in that moment. I miss the performances
of songs that feel like the birth of entire planets.
With Welch and Rawlings, you could get that
feeling fi ve, six times a night.
When I met Welch and Rawlings in August,
they were as warm as their shows have led me to
expect, but there was a tentativeness, too, as we
positioned ourselves more than six feet apart to
talk. Welch and Rawlings, like myself and many
others, hadn’t interacted with too many people
during the spring and summer.
We were standing in a giant room inside
Woodland Studios, the duo’s home base in East
Nashville, a neighborhood hit hard by a torna-
do that ripped through the city in March, right
before the pandemic confi ned much of the coun-
try to our homes. ‘‘If you look up,’’ Welch said,
indicating a ceiling haphazardly patched with
what seemed to be wood, ‘‘you can see where
we had no roof.’’ The building had once been
the Woodland Theater, before becoming a studio
where Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash and Willie
Nelson, among others, rolled out folk and coun-
try hits at a rapid pace. Rawlings and Welch, who
are also a couple, bought the building about two
decades ago after it was nearly destroyed by a dif-
ferent tornado and then condemned by the city.
Welch, wearing all black (including her mask),walked gingerly through the space as if she were
seeing it again with fresh eyes and calmly laid out
the damage. In March, Welch and Rawlings ran
through the storm from their nearby house to the
now- roofl ess studio to rescue their equipment and
— more important — their master recordings. As
the rain poured in, they had to keep moving things
around for nearly 10 hours: boxes of recordings,
rolling crates full of guitars. There was no power
and no cell service at the time, no way to reach
out to anyone else. It was just the two of them and
a friend who was living in the studio’s apartment,
trying to save what they could, illuminating the
darkness with dying fl ashlights.
‘‘Dave and I have literally, physically saved every
piece of our world,’’ Welch said, ‘‘And it begs the
question: Why did I save this? What is the value of
this? What did I intend to do with this?’’ Her voice
was hushed and contemplative, as if she were no
longer speaking to me but to herself. ‘‘Did I think
all of this was just going to be safe forever?’’
For the duo, the months after the tornado and
the pandemic struck led, perhaps unexpectedly, to
an increased output. They released ‘‘All the Good
Times,’’ an album of old folk songs, at the start of
July, and they will spend the rest of the year releas-
ing ‘‘Boots 2: The Lost Songs,’’ a three- volume col-
lection of recordings that were rescued from the
fl ooded studio (the fi rst volume was released in the
middle of July). It is unlike Welch and Rawlings to
push this much music into the world in a single
burst — 58 songs in half a year, which is seven
more than those on Welch’s fi ve studio albums
combined. But with the country careering toward
new depths of uncertainty, Welch and Rawlings
have discovered a new emotional urgency. They
are once again returning to what they know: songs
about the slow, challenging, beautiful heat of liv-
ing, about people having to make hard decisions
on a path to goodness.
‘‘Gillian writes in a way that sounds like she’s
from the 1800s,’’ the singer- songwriter Phoebe
Bridgers tells me. ‘‘Everything is so rich and so
grounded. The songs feel timeless, even though
they are so genre- based.’’ Rawlings and Welch,
who are 50 and 53, have had an outsize infl u-
ence on both song writers of their own generation
and younger songwriters pursuing folk music, or26 11.8.20