even on the outskirts of it. Bridgers is one of the
many examples of younger artists who have been
inspired by the duo (she routinely covers the song
‘‘Everything Is Free’’). ‘‘The pairing of Welch and
Rawlings,’’ Bridgers told me over the phone, ‘‘is
a dream. It’s kind of a miracle that they found
each other — these two people obsessed with
song writing and tape and getting things perfect.
They’ve become almost one entity.’’
Welch and Rawlings recorded ‘‘All the Good
Times’’ on their couch in the early months of the
pandemic, thumbing through an old dog- eared
folk songbook that they’d held dear since their
time at Berklee College of Music in the early ’90s.
The songs sound intimate, almost as if you are
in the room with them but perhaps hiding, an
uninvited guest to their party. The recordings
are sparse — so sparse that the excitement isn’t
in the instrumentation itself but in the slow crawl
of two voices, seeking to meet each other in the
fi eld of some chorus or crescendo. The best of the
revisitations are the ones that ache, like the title
track, which slows down Ralph Stanley’s version.
The song is about parting with a lover, but when
Rawlings’s voice kicks in the door with the lyrics
‘‘I wish to the Lord I’d never been born/or died
when I was young,’’ it is so rightfully defl ating that
it suddenly becomes a eulogy for an entire coun-
try, an entire world as we knew it. And that is the
trick with ‘‘All the Good Times’’ — fi nding in these
old and familiar songs new and unfamiliar griefs.
The fi nal song on ‘‘All the Good Times’’ is
‘‘Y’all Come,’’ a song recorded by Bill Mon-
roe that is, quite simply, about gathering with
friends and neighbors. Their version is a touch
slower than Monroe’s, but it still keeps the same
jubilant tone. When I brought up their rendi-
tion, Welch grinned wryly. ‘‘That’s funny, in this
moment,’’ she said, lightly shaking her head and
gesturing with her hand to the vast outdoors.
‘‘It’s like: ‘Y’all come and see us when you can.
We’re not going anywhere.’ ’’
IT STARTED TO RAIN, and our plan to sit and
talk at a table and chairs looking over the green
of Rawlings and Welch’s backyard was scuttled.
We huddled under an awning along the side of
their house as the storm beat out a rhythm above
our heads. Free of the masks once adorning our
faces, Welch and Rawlings fell more comfortably
into conversation. Rawlings is often delightful-
ly tangential — self- aware enough to know he’s
being tangential but too excited to stop himself,
the way lovers of music can be when they feel
as if they’ve met someone new they can banter
with. Welch speaks the way she writes, the way
she sings — with a deeply controlled thought-
fulness layered with a matter- of- fact honesty. As
we talked about some of our singing and writing
heroes, Welch mentioned Bob Dylan. ‘‘I don’t
know what I’ll do when he’s gone,’’ she told me,
pausing to stare into the rain- soaked distance. ‘‘I
can’t even talk about it.’’
Welch and Rawlings are writer’s writers, but
they’re generous enough to open multiple door-
ways: They don’t write simple songs as much as
they write richly layered songs that are simple for
any listener to fi nd some grounding in. They are
also nostalgic, not just in an aesthetic sense but
also in a very practical sense. They nod in their
lyrics to the heroes of their past, the friends of
their present. In the fourth verse of ‘‘I Dream a
Highway,’’ the sprawling, 15- minute fi nal song on
‘‘Time (The Revelator),’’ from 2001, Welch sings:
‘‘Which lover are you, Jack of Diamonds? Now
you be Emmylou, and I’ll be Gram.’’
Emmylou Harris has made a career out of a
great many talents, but one of them is her versatil-
ity as a duet partner — notably, as Welch and Raw-
lings say in the song, in the early ’70s with Gram
Parsons. But also with Dolly Parton and Linda
Ronstadt on two albums as a trio, and at times
over the past two decades with Welch herself.
‘‘Most singers, most people I hang around
with, people love to sing together,’’ Harris told
me over the phone when asked about the roots
that Welch and Rawlings continually tap into. But
there’s a certain joy in fi nding what she called
‘‘that perfect third voice together.’’ She likened
it to dancing. ‘‘You don’t have to be fl eet of foot;
you’re just joining in with someone else.’’
Harris insists that Welch and Rawlings have
remained so sturdy as a duo because they would
be playing music regardless of whether anyone
was listening to them. ‘‘They’re so pure without
being precious,’’ she says. ‘‘In their own way,
they’re punk.’’
The two have endured a lot this year. In the midst
of rebuilding a studio, in the midst of a pandemic,
trapped at home, they have been reformatting old
songs they made, old songs they love. Maybe it’s
a way of living out another version of their adult-
hood, another version of a world that might have
felt better or at least a little more promising.
With the rain settling, Welch and Rawlings
told me about the origin of ‘‘Boots 2.’’ It is a col-
lection of songs that was stashed after being
recorded in December 2002, born of an eager
desire to fulfi ll a contract. In 1994, shortly after
they moved to Nashville, Welch got a publishing
deal that required her to produce a certain num-
ber of songs every year. Less than a year later, she
got her own record deal, causing her to fall far
behind on her publishing contract. Welch owed
over 30 songs, but as her own career was gaining
momentum, she was desperate to get out of the
deal. Rawlings had a simple idea: If the company
needed songs, the duo would give them songs.
Over the course of a weekend — ‘‘a long weekend,’’
Welch clarifi ed — the duo wrote 48 songs.‘‘I write in pencil in college- ruled spiral note-
books, and there were just stacks of them,’’ Welch
told me. ‘‘Dave would page through the note-
book, fi nd a contender, type it out, bring it in
to me and say, ‘This is the unfi nished lyric and
unfi nished song.’ And then he would go in and
start trying to fi nd another. And I would try to
just fi nish it by the time he’d come back in with
another. Like an assembly line.’’
They put the songs to tape, but not as prop-
er recordings, merely to document them. The
tapes sat for 18 years, most of the songs heard
by no one. Upon their post-storm rescue, they
were remastered.
‘‘Boots 2’’ made me think of what Harris said:
It does feel a little bit like a punk record, not
just in the rapid and somewhat rogue nature of
its recording but also in its pace. The songs are
undoubtedly fi nished and immensely sharp, but
they’re quicker than the usual Rawlings- Welch
experience. Many of them clock in at just around
two minutes — narratives packed tightly into
small spaces, sprints instead of a single marathon.
‘‘We are often working with what is a very small
kernel of a thought or an idea and trying to keep
the focus there,’’ Rawlings tells me. ‘‘And one of
my favorite things about writing in general is that
you are as on the outside of it as anyone.’’ He also
described their process as being like ‘‘water run-
ning down a hillside. It follows the same path every
time. And it’s a path that we think is pretty.’’
In ‘‘First Place Ribbon,’’ which is only two min-
utes long, listeners are dropped into a county fair,
walking past a kissing booth, with a character they
might feel as though they’ve known for ages. There
are songs about the vast blankness of a road that
feels as if it could be a road you have known and
been on. Songs about bad men trying to do good
to get out of a bad place. There’s no concern for
the neatness or resolution; sometimes the song just
ends. As with Bruce Springsteen’s ‘‘Atlantic City,’’ a
scene is laid out, the stakes are determined and the
life within the song has to carry on, without a lis-
tener present to watch it unfold. There’s generosity
in this, too. An ability to trail off in a manner that
allows for some fl exing of the imagination. For the
song to live in the mind for hours after it is gone.THE BEST DUOS and duet singers understand that
creating harmony is sometimes a series of musical
negotiations, sometimes a series of personal nego-
tiations, sometimes both. If you are Daryl Hall and
John Oates, for example, still touring hits but not
particularly interested in creating new work, the
musical negotiation supersedes all else. If you are
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel in the early ’70s,
competing ambitions force the personal rela-
tionship to break down, despite the brilliance of
the output. If you’re Gram Parsons and Emmylou
Harris, the negotiations are made for you by fate,The New York Times Magazine 27