“We both passed the audition,” recalls Welch. Welch was the adopted daughter of Hollywood television composers, Rawlings a Rhode Island native who’d come comparatively late to the guitar in 1986. The pair first met in 1989 while auditioning for a country band at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music, where both were studying. At a time when the profile of bluegrass in America has never been higher – when an Alison Krauss can make the Top 20 Album chart and you can’t move for summer bluegrass festivals – they are becoming one very hot property. Since its release last spring, Revival has garnered the duo across-the-board adulation and taken them all the way from the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, where they live, to the Purcell Room in London. Produced in Los Angeles by T-Bone Burnett, Revival features legends like James Burton and Jim Keltner, but mostly it is just Gillian (hard G) and David, performing quietly together as they do onstage tonight. The girl is called Gillian Welch, the boy David Rawlings, and together they’re responsible, by almost universal critical consent, for the outstanding country debut of 1996. They rev it up a little for ‘Pass You By’ and ‘Tear My Stillhouse Down’ and the effect is just the same. They sing beautiful, chilling songs like ‘By The Mark’ and ‘Orphan Girl’ and ‘One More Dollar’ and the place is simply transfixed. Not only do the couple’s voices blend superbly – the girl’s stark, vibratoless alto shadowed by the boy’s soft baritone – but their guitars, a 1935 Epiphone for the boy and a big reddish-brown Guild for the girl, also intertwine with unearthly neatness. They’re doing it, moreover, to the wild applause of the sort of folks who wear combat boots and dye their hair, most of whom seem to know these songs – the song about the V-8, the song about “the dead baby” – by heart and only want more of what the lanky girl and bony boy do so very, very well. A raw, callow-looking couple straight out of a Depression-era Walker Evans pic are singing plaintive mountain songs in a bar in, of all places, Chicago – not commonly renowned as a bluegrass town, to my knowledge, even if it is home to Freakwater. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg prompts me to share this MOJO interview with Welch and David Rawlings from December 1997, plus (below) an Uncut review of the very fine Soul Journey from August 2003…ĭETACH YOURSELF for a moment and this here’s a pretty rum scene.
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