Album Reviews

First their Woodland Studio took a direct hit from the tornado that tore through Nashville March of 2020, and then came the Covid lock down.

Like the rest of us locked down at home but with more talent than most, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings decided to produce a home recording. The result is this all-analog gem released first in the fall of 2020 in a limited to 2,500 copies edition available only on the Acony Records Online Store and last year in a more standard jacketed edition.

Being analog devotees, you can be sure the recording was to tape and remained in the analog domain through lacquer cutting on the couple's restored lathe now located closer to home in Nashville.

The song selection is a combination of traditional laments along with some familiar covers of tunes by Bob Dylan ("Senõr" from Street Legal and "Abandoned Love" dropped from Desire in 1975 and finally released a decade later on the Biograph compilation), John Prine (“Hello In There”) and Norman Blake’s “Ginseng Sullivan” from his 1971 album Back Home In Sulphur Springs. The set begins with a cover of Elizabeth Cotten’s “Oh Babe In Ain’t No Lie”. “Freight Train”, Cotten’s oft-covered and best known song has been credited for helping to start the “skiffle” movement in the U.K. There’s also a cover of the oft-covered “Jackson”, a Jerry Leiber song written not with Mike Stoller but with Billy Edd Wheeler, first heard on The Kingston Trio’s 1963 Sunny Side album. “Jackson” begins after Dylan’s “Abandoned Love” abruptly breaks down. The song is positively celebratory following nine appropriately downcast lock down tunes. The couple go out on an optimistic note with a cover of Arlie Duff’s “You All Come” written in 1953 sometimes covered as here, as “Y’all Come” (“come see us when you can”), which perhaps looks forward to live touring .

The production doesn’t attempt to produce a studio recording at home. Rather it’s a living room recording done right—or whatever room in the Welch/Rawlings house was used. A Telefunken SM2c condenser stereo microphone vividly and accurately captures the three-dimensional space and the duo in it. Rawlings used an Otari ¼” in 2 track deck recording at 15 IPS. Playback was via a Studer A820 with the signal cut directly to lacquer on a Neumann VMS80 lathe fitted with an Ortofon DSS 731 cutterhead. Also utilized: a Fairchild 670 limiter, Barry Wolifson’s (Sterling Sound’s lathe tech) M/S decoder and a P&G 1500 Series Stereo Fader. Can it get more purist?

You are sure to enjoy both the music making and the sound throughout. I have to single out, though, the cover of John Prine’s “Hello in There”. If the lockdown didn’t occasionally drive you to tears, this “Hello in There” just might be the ticket. An album of pure music making not to be missed. It won a 2021 Grammy for Best Folk Album.