Mick Hartley

For such a powerful and original voice in American music, Gillian Welch has been disappointingly parsimonious with her album releases. Her latest, The Harrow and the Harvest, is her first in eight years – though there was partner David Rawlings' album of 2009 in between.  Here's one of the new songs:

From the WSJ:

Singer and guitarist David Rawlings has long backed Ms. Welch, a leading voice in American roots music. Now, like his visage on her new CD, his creative contributions are coming to the forefront. When they sing in harmony, their voices blur. Their songwriting is so interwoven that they forget who contributed which lyric. And during the eight years since Ms. Welch's last release, Mr. Rawlings stumbled with her into countless artistic dead ends. A tandem breakthrough in songwriting yielded the album released this week, "The Harrow & the Harvest."

"I'm not the artist; we're the artist," Ms. Welch says….

Their process had run aground after the release of "Soul Journey" in 2003. During these "fallow years," they wrote, recorded and discarded reams of material. Mr. Rawlings struggles to pinpoint why the songs failed: "They were false to us."

The pressure eased somewhat when Ms. Welch backed her partner on an album and tour under the name the Dave Rawlings Machine. Last fall, however, the duo hit a low point when they played a favorite San Francisco music festival with no fresh material. "We were both inconsolable," Ms. Welch says. "The level of self-loathing just triggered something." They scheduled themselves to write a new song each week. By the new year, they had enough material to hit the studio. Mr. Rawlings says, "Now there's a complete roar again."

I haven't heard the new album yet, though it's getting good reviews. For me, for her work to date, it's the earlier the better. On her debut, the 1996 Revival, she was already coming up with songs like Orphan Girl or By the Mark which seemed like they were, well, revivals of old American classics.

She also does what may be the best ever version of the old Gram Parsons classic Hickory Wind.