After years producing and co-writing bespoke country music for Gillian Welch, Dave Rawlings has found his voice as a lead singer, writes SIOBHÁN LONG
TO AFICIONADOS of sublime country music, he's probably best known (unofficially) as Mr Gillian Welch. But with 2009's release of his debut solo album, A Friend of a Friend, Dave Rawlings is finally stepping into the limelight. A Friend of a Friendis another pristine instalment in the bespoke collection that Rawlings (and Welch) have toiled over, long and hard, for the past 14 years since Welch's 1996 debut, Revival.
It's a freewheeling mix of raucous bluegrass, plaintive love songs, Panavision meditations on reincarnation and a prescient commentary on life's dark underbelly, How's About You, that reeks of Woody Guthrie's depression-era blues while still sounding disturbingly in tune with these uncertain times we live in.
For his solo debut, Rawlings gathered together a ragbag of songs he’d written over the years and ushered them into daylight. It was a task not completed without its share of labour pains, he admits. Long content to lurk in the shadows as Gillian Welch’s co-writer, accompanist, producer and arranger, Rawlings had to excavate to find his own voice as a lead singer. It was an experience that came as a surprise to him.
“It was eye-opening for me!”, he says in a gentle Rhode Island accent which gives barely a hint of his current Nashville home place. “I had to separate that part of my brain that works as a producer from myself as an artist and singer. It is very challenging to your ego to listen to yourself and be very critical of the way you sound, and yet that’s exactly what you have to be.”
Was the record an exercise in redressing the balance, by swapping the limelight with his long-time partner? Rawlings is adamant that this wasn’t the spur for his belated solo debut.
“I’ve always loved doing a song on my own in Gillian’s show,” he says, “but it wasn’t until about three years ago that I noticed that my voice, which had always been thin and reedy, had, with age, developed a little more size and a little more tone to it. I thought that I was doing a better job singing lead than I’d ever done in my life, and Gillian agreed. That was probably the initial impetus for this project.
“But, you know, it wasn’t as though I had been sitting around for a decade saying ‘if only I could make my own record’. I’m enough of a headstrong individual that if I’d wanted to make my own record at any point, I just would have.”
Thin and reedy voices are the backbone of American folk and country music. Think Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Neil Young – theirs was some of the earliest music Rawlings heard, and he responded readily to it.
“You could fill a book with things that people have written about these artists that aren’t glowing in any way,” he says, “but they’ve got that something special.”
For a musician who’s forged a reputation for bold production decisions with Welch (wide open sonic vistas) and Old Crow Medicine Show (loose-limbed, jangling bluegrass), Rawlings is distinctly nonplussed by the nanoscience which can determine the fate of music production these days.
For him, the fun was to be found in navigating a route to the heart of a song, a process that could take anything from hours to literally days on his own in the studio. His reading of I Hear Them All(co-written by Rawlings and Ketch Secor), a melancholy tribute to those on the margins of and a subtle sideswipe at the politics of power, is a stark reinterpretation of a song covered in more riotous fashion by Old Crow Medicine Show.
Rawlings recalls his “suck it and see” approach to recording with no small satisfaction. “The interesting thing about that recording is that I had seen in old LPs from the 1970s that they would have these great big old microphones. And for that particular song, I recorded it in a very small booth with the microphone placed just as I had seen it in those pictures. I actually wrapped ladies’ hose around the microphone too, ’cos I’d seen that in a picture! And it really made me laugh that sometimes you can just set something up as it is in a picture, and then get something very close to the effect you’re looking for too.
“Of course, it also gave me the opportunity to go and buy ladies’ stockings at a gas station in Nashville at 2.30 in the morning!”
His choice of Dave Rawlings Machine as a band title suggests that Rawlings might be channelling Woody Guthrie, whose guitar carried the infamous declaration that “this machine kills fascists”.
“Pretty much every band name I’ve ever knew of in my life sounded silly to me when I first heard it!” he cackles, “but I guess it has my name in it, and I like the Woody connection too. It gives us some artwork inspiration too.”
The Dave Rawlings Machine, Old Crow Medicine Show and Joe Pug will play at Belfast’s Coors Light Open House Festival on Saturday at 8pm. For tickets, see openhousefestival.com
