In 2009, a full six years after the release of Gillian Welch’s critically acclaimed Soul Journey, Welch’s partner David Rawlings was asked when their next album would come out. “On the happiest day of my life,” he replied.
It should be a good week for Rawlings then, because after eight long years The Harrow & The Harvest was finally released on Tuesday, June 28.
“I think we are both really happy to finally have a new record out,” Welch answered when contacted via email. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had this many new songs to add into the show. I’m excited and curious to see how the new songs behave live.”
Welch attended UCSC in the ’80s, where she majored in photography, played bass in a goth band and drums in a psych rock outfit and spent two seasons working on an organic flower and vegetable farm in the Pogonip where, she says, “I was the slime queen of the radicchio patch.”
Harrow: (n.) an implement consisting of a heavy frame set with teeth or tines that is dragged over plowed land to break up clods, remove weeds and cover seed. “Harrowing” is derived from the backbreaking difficulty of the work.
Like the tool, the songs on The Harrow & The Harvest are heavy and set with teeth. They are populated by itinerant farm workers, spurned brides and Catholic school dropouts; concern losses of innocence, losses of faith and losses of love; contain stubborn mules, rivers of whiskey, rivers of fire and turns of phrase like “that’s the way the cornbread crumbles.”
The album process was rightly rough too: in the eight years since their last release, Welch has said she and Rawlings wrote enough songs to fill several albums, but never liked any enough to record.
The 10 songs that ultimately made it on The Harrow & The Harvest are stripped-down as in the past—just Welch and Rawlings on their guitars, sometimes with a banjo or harmonica—but they have a precision and a deliberateness that is different from previous records.
The practiced feel of the songs is no doubt an result of their protracted development; Welch and Rawlings have been playing the achingly beautiful and haunting ballad “The Way It Will Be,” a holdover from the last album, for years.
On the new album, “The Way It Will Be” is part of a triptych, followed directly by the up-tempo (if decidedly fatalistic) “The Way It Goes” and, five tracks later, the record’s final song, “The Way The Whole Thing Ends,” a piece so simple and slow that it feels like it should be emanating from a hand-cranked music box.
Repositioning the same simple phrase three ways with strikingly different effects, Welch and Rawlings show off their skill at crafting deceptively complex songs that often invoke several musical traditions at once, using the most basic tools. Other standouts on the album include the loss-of-innocence lullaby “Tennessee” (vintage Townes Van Zandt) and the starkly arranged work song “Hard Times.”
Welch and Rawlings will be kicking off a tour for The Harrow & The Harvest in Santa Cruz next week with a show at the Cocoanut Grove. “We’ve wanted to play the Cocoanut Grove Ballroom for years. Glad it’s finally happening,” Welch said. We are too, Gillian. We are too.
GILLIAN WELCH
Wednesday, July 6, 8pm
Cocoanut Grove Ballroom, 400 Beach St., Santa Cruz
Tickets $31.75 at FolkYeah.com
