Acclaimed folk duo finally follow 2020 covers album with her first new songs since 2011. By Sylvie Simmons.

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings ★★★★

Woodland

ACONY. CD/DL/LP

TALK ABOUT long-awaited: it’s been 13 years since the duo’s last album of new material, The Harrow & The Harvest (2011). Still, the song-well hadn’t entirely dried up. There were those albums released under Rawlings’ name in which Welch participated and her partner took centre-stage. Good albums, but the songs were often more energised than the stoic, strangely hypnotic albums with Welch’s name up-front. In 2015 the Americana Association presented them with a Lifetime Achievement In Songwriting award. It must have felt like a gold watch and a happy retirement card when the pair’s next (and until now latest) official album All The Good Times (Are Past And Gone) turned out to be all covers. But here they are with 10 new songs sounding for the most part like they’ve never been away.

Named after the studio they bought and fixed up 20 years ago and spent these last four years re-fixing after serious tornado damage (see the news story in MOJO 371), the album eventually emerged from Welch and Rawlings rescuing their old tapes, demos and notebooks. At least one track has a long history: Lawman, which the duo performed at the 2008 Newport Folk Festival. Singing in the character of a woman who knows that the cops are coming to kill her man, it’s one of those sober beauties with a sense of impending doom that Gillian Welch does so well.

Deep in the woods: Gillian Welch & David Rawlings sound like they’ve never been away.

Opening track Empty Trainload Of Sky is a train song – a goods train – with a touch of blues, on the laid-back side of midtempo. It starts, as many of these songs do, with Rawlings playing guitar. There’s an abundance of guitar breaks on the album, some solo, others backed by the subtlest of bands: gentle drums, steel, some strings. Welch’s voice, softly smudged by Rawlings’ backing vocal, still has that mysterious