Soul Journey

A young singer/songwriter armed with a voice and sensibility far beyond her years, Gillian Welch drew widespread acclaim for her deft, evocative resurrection of the musical styles most commonly associated with rural Appalachia of the early 20th century. Welch was born in 1968 in California and grew up in West Los Angeles, where her parents scored the music for the comedy program The Carol Burnett Show. It was as a child that she became fascinated by bluegrass and early country music, in particular the work of the Stanley Brothers, the Delmore Brothers, and the Carter Family.

In the early '90s, Welch attended the Berklee School of Music in Boston, MA, where she began performing her own material, as well as traditional country and bluegrass songs, as part of a duo with fellow student David Rawlings. After honing their skills in local open mike showcases, the duo began performing regularly throughout the country. While opening for Peter Rowan in Nashville, they were spotted by musician and producer T-Bone Burnett, who helped Welch and Rawlings land a record deal. With Burnett producing, they cut 1996's starkly beautiful Revival, an album split between bare-bones duo performances — some even recorded in mono to capture a bygone sound — and more full-bodied cuts featuring legendary session men like guitarist James Burton, upright bassist Roy Huskey Jr., and drummers Buddy Harmon and Jim Keltner.

Her sophomore album, Hell Among the Yearlings, followed in 1998. The years following her second release found Welch involved in several soundtracks (O Brother Where Art Thou, Songcatcher), tribute albums (Songs of Dwight Yoakam: Will Sing for Food, Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons), and guest spots on other artists' albums (Ryan Adams' >Heartbreaker, Mark Knopfler's Sailing to Philadelphia). Following the success of O Brother, Welch and Rawlings found themselves in the center of a traditional American folk revival and released their third album, Time (The Revelator), in mid-2001. Steady touring, guest appearances, and the release of a DVD (he Revelator Collection) kept the pair busy, but in 2003 they found time to record Soul Journey, their second release on their own Acony Records label.

SETTING: The Lactating Orchid, an independent business establishment ASH: Feminist bookstores creep me out. I sometimes worry that I'll get an inrection. REESE: Being here shouldn't unnerve you any more than I'm freaked out by Foot Locker, or Colonel Rapehawk's Burrito Sports Satellite Steakhouse. ASH: These places brim with so many contradictions. The clientele range from pragmatic activists to tarot-addled goons, so the merchandise fittingly runs the gamut from useful political analyses to superstitious hokum. And why are Gillian Welch CDs always playing? REESE: Be charitable, patriarch. Welch fascinatingly embodies modern feminism's slipperiness. She should be a cliché within a cliché wrapped in a cliché with a side of clichéradish sauce, especially under the weight of those "Southern," range-roaming, country-road tropes. But her albums are weirdly fresh and weirdly, er, cool. ASH: Especially this new album with its occasional-- and radical, for Welch-- "full band" approach (featuring contributors to albums by rural postureminders such as Beck and Son Volt). REESE: Did you just speak in a parenthetical? Or am I inside your mind? ASH: Alls I'm saying is that points on this album have much more to do with the sparse, dolorous pop of Aimee Mann than they do with countresses like Emmylou Harris. REESE: Hey wait, Emmylou Harris covered Gillian Welch. ASH: Exactly my point. Harris is known as an expert arranger, while Mann and Welch are songwriters, even though-- ahem-- they compose with male partners. Besides, Harris covered Welch's most popular tune, "Orphan Girl", which every self-dramatizing spaghetti-strapper over-lip-syncs in her Honda Civic. REESE: I love that song. ASH: The song is, like, the hokey pokey of familial absentia. "I have no mother, no father, no sister, no brother/ I am an orphan girl"? I'm gonna write one called "Multiple Amputee" that goes "I have no arms, no legs..." REESE: Metallica already did that. If you weren't stupid, you'd see that "Orphan Girl" is a formal eschewing of the matriarchal burdens associated with rural womanhood, just as the speaker on this album's "Wrecking Ball" appropriates the "rolling stone" stance usually romanticized by men. You know, I can't help but notice that your own Southern-tropist swoon-tune gets covered here: wasn't "I Had a Real Good Mother and Father" popularized by Bonnie "Prince" Oldham back in his days as a Palace sibling? ASH: What a tune. [ASH blushes and fingers his lip.] While we're dishing out penis-points, let's give some credit to the sweetly rendered song associated with Mississippi John Hurt, "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor". Also note that the arrangement owes a dollar or two to the first disc of Dylan's "bootleg" threefer. Meanwhile, your precious "Wrecking Ball" is just an outtake from Jason Molina's Magnolia Electric Co. with fiddle overdubs. REESE: Hmph. I see what you mean about the crossroads of seriousness and blarney, though. How can an album so reticent and measured bear a moniker as new-agey as Soul Journey? That reeks of Shirley MacLaine and that star-chart-fondling crystal-culture. ASH: A shame, because the songs are so no-nonsense, trafficking in classic idioms (riding with the "top down" is libertine, etc) and landscape metaphors ("lowlands" and "black highways" mean trouble, etc). Except for "One Monkey"? What the hell? "One monkey don't stop the show"? REESE: Is it about not being distracted from the big picture by an insulting fad, such as a Nashville whorelet or a dopey politico? Is its punishing repetition purposeful, or a cave-in to Tracy Chapmanship? Maybe it's borrowing the language of pre-Civil Rights-era America, saying something about one uppity Negro not being a threat to the status quo? That explanation would offset some of the cultural baggage that this "throwback" music totes around. ASH: I don't know. This album's most "bluegrass" song ("No One Knows My Name") is just a refashioning of "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain When She Comes". Seems pretty harmless. REESE: Hey, look, this store sells those bumper stickers that say THE BANJO IS AN AFRICAN INSTRUMENT! Maybe I could include Welch in my doctoral thesis on Anglosimilitude. It would fit with my bachelor's thesis, King Kut: Castration Metaphors in Old-School Rap and my master's thesis I Am the Eighteenth Pale Descendant: Steven Patrick Morrissey and Whiteness as an Othering Force. ASH: I wish I were a turntablist. "One Monkey" would make a mean mash-up with Whodini's "The Freaks Come Out at Night". REESE: Ugh. That kind of futurism, which debases art's factory-sealedness, is why I want to take refuge in pastoral works such as Soul Journey. Lightning Bolt makes me feel seventy years old and addicted to painkillers and marathons of Diagnosis: Murder. ASH: Fair enough. Welch is definitely the most relevant of the O Brother Pluck Art Thou gang of neo-yodelers. And I reckon that if you find the bleats-n-beats of The Rapture soulless, then you might love this soft, warm, but still interestingly distant work. Then again, Soul Journey remains a tad raptureless.

— William Bowers, Pitchfork