Nashville, 2pm. Gillian Welch has recently woken up and just finished her breakfast. She was working late the previous night, employing her skills as a writer of some of the bleakest song-stories ever to escape the confines of Tennessee, writes Tony Clayton-Lea.
Welch rests somewhat uneasily in the country music firmament - she is not a Reba McEntire or a Dolly Parton; she is not a Shania Twain or a LeAnn Rimes. Neither, however, is she a Lucinda Williams or an Emmylou Harris, a Cortney Tidwell or a Paula Frazer.
Welch stands very much alone and apart - of tradition but not necessarily hidebound to it. At the heart of what she is, she says, is music and emotion. "How do I make it sound not like a cliche? I guess it's those as well as thoughts, words, sounds."
Born in Los Angeles in 1968, and as a child sent to a liberal school by her songwriter parents, Welch is the public front of a partnership with the virtually invisible David Rawlings, a rangy guitar player and astute songwriter who has been accompanying Welch from her early 1990s student days at Boston's Berklee College of Music.
They began their combined career playing traditional country songs in bluegrass clubs around the east coast of the US, adding in small steps their own distinctive original material that drew musically from Appalachian styles and lyrically from the Depression-era rural US. Moving to Nashville in 1992, the pair (with Welch pushed out front as the main attraction, a compromise of sorts that doesn't seem to have affected their relationship) worked hard on making a debut album that would strike the right notes between commercial and idiosyncratic.
Revival was released in 1996, and set the tone: savagely moral, immensely melodic, sparse and not at all attuned to the dictates of the mainstream. Very quickly and without fanfare, a new voice in what we shall loosely term alt-country was unleashed.
The release of Revival happily coincided with the re-emergence of Emmylou Harris as a force to be reckoned with; in 1995, Harris had deconstructed burdensome expectations by releasing Wrecking Ball, a stunning work of wandering, mantric/ambient songs soaked in the well of traditional folk. Produced by Daniel Lanois, the record featured mostly covers - Neil Young, Steve Earle, Lanois, Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams and Anna McGarrigle pitched in, as did Welch with Orphan Girl. The outcome was that Harris picked up a Grammy for best contemporary folk album in 1996, just as Revival (which included Welch's rather more austere version of Orphan Girl) filtered out into the community. The result was the start of respectful column inches and curious observers to her shows.
WELCH ADMITS, HOWEVER, that initially herself and Rawlings confused people by playing music that was fundamentally skin and bone. "What my partner and I do on some level is so basic," she explains. "But people have an issue about whether we're traditional or modern, when really we are what we are - we're both of those things. It still is entertaining to me how people look at us with our acoustic instruments and can't decide what we are. With the acoustic side, that's where it starts for me, not where it stops.
"I'm happy to say now that there is slightly less confusion. For one thing I think people at the beginning were wondering when myself and David were going to start hiring other musicians. Of course, from the start that was one of the things we didn't have any interest in. We've played and recorded with other musicians, but what we really do is play as a duet. That happened without us knowing or planning it. I didn't grow up with the idea of wanting to play with just one other person. It's simply a lot more fun performing with one other person than yourself.
"That's how it started, and honestly at the beginning we just liked singing together. That was a motivator."
When did she feel that the work was starting to be appreciated? Was it a gradual thing?
"It's a continuous upward escalator. It's rather surprising to me, actually. It seems to be moving into different spheres; we started out in what I call the singer-songwriter world - not too surprising, because that's what I came out of. And then some country and bluegrass bands started covering my songs, so then it moved into that world. And then it moved into more sort of rock and alternative areas. One of the surprises over the past couple of years is that it has drifted over to the type of person who would say that they don't listen to country or folk or whatever - but that they loved the Revelator album."
Actually titled Time (The Revelator), and released in 2001, this is the Welch record that sorts out the casual listener from the committed fan. She says that even though herself and Rawlings play quietly, it has been brought to their attention that there's something hardcore and incessant about the songs on the record. Certainly, not many people (Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed and Neil Young are several others that spring to mind) could get away with writing and performing something as minimalist and hypnotically compelling as the 15-minute closer I Dream a Highway.
"Who would be crazy enough to play something that minimal and that slowly for so long? Dave and I certainly space out when we play, and one of the interesting things that I hope we provide for people is that we reject that different time space when we play. I get a sense that people value that - we project and generate a very different pace at which the world goes by."
DOES SHE HAVE a conscious awareness of this, or does she just go with the flow? "It depends. It's somewhat akin to being very sick, when you have a fever, or when you have a very bad hangover, or even when you initially wake up. You just react differently and things go by differently. When we're really in it, time can go by either quickly, slowly or without any notice at all. It's actually an altered state. I'm sure it's the same for a lot of artists."
Sombre and mournful austerity seem to be part and parcel of Welch's art; these are in stark contrast to her personality, which comes across - in this instance, at least - as Diane Keaton quirkiness mixed with dapper efficiency and a can-do attitude.
Yet it's the songs that pick at the threads, undoing them in a steady, almost fastidious manner. "It's not a cliche to say that my songs are imbued with tragedy," she allows. "It's just that I don't often step back and take stock of how the songs are weighing in on the happy-to-sad meter. I'm kinda going for whatever moves me the most."
Welch doesn't think that artists can change their natural predisposition or predilection. Change for her, she reveals in a less abstract moment, seems incredibly difficult.
"Some artists seem to have more of a natural relationship with sad things. Some have more of a gift for joyful things. Some photographers take fantastic pictures of men, and some take great photographs of women. That's just how it is. In a way it would be foolish for an artist to try to do otherwise simply to round out what they do.
"You should keep doing what you can do - that, possibly, no one else can."
Gillian Welch will play at Midlands Music Festival, which takes place on July 28 and 29 at Belvedere House, Mullingar, Co Westmeath; www.midlandsmusicfestival.ie