What Gillian Welch and David Rawlings Took from the Tornado

Since 1996, when Gillian Welch and her partner, the guitarist David Rawlings, released “Revival,” their début album, they’ve been making tense and eerie acoustic music about desire and devastation, the sacred and the profane, by and by, Lord, by and by. The duo’s music—some of the first to be dubbed “Americana”—often feels both ancient and instinctive, as though these songs have always existed, oozing out of a phonograph horn on some distant astral plane. These days, it seems preposterous that Welch’s provenance—she was adopted and brought up in Los Angeles—was once controversial within the roots-music scene. Though it was honed in the American South, the vernacular music that she and Rawlings pull from is inclusive and yielding by design; to be proprietary about this sort of folk music is to misunderstand its ethos entirely. These songs obliterate notions of time and place, focussing, instead, on the threads of joy and sorrow that make us human.

This month, Welch and Rawlings will release “Woodland,” their seventh collaboration. The record was shaped, in part, by the fallout of a catastrophic tornado that whipped through Nashville in the early-morning hours of March 3, 2020. I recently spoke with Welch and Rawlings from their home on the east side of the city. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, I found them thoughtful, open, and prone to finishing each other’s sentences. “Before we started talking to you today, I was actually thinking about the frustrations of trying to give meaningful interviews,” Welch told me. “Art is how I relate to the world; I have to do this to communicate, because I’m not that great at expressing myself outside of it. I try; I’m a decently verbal person. What’s really going on in here, it’s hard for me to tell you—but it goes into the songs.”

Your new record is named after Woodland Studios, in East Nashville, which you bought in 2002. Can you tell me a little about your history there?

GILLIAN WELCH: We worked there on our first record, with T Bone Burnett.

DAVID RAWLINGS: We intended to make the second record there, then T Bone wanted to make it out in California, at Sound City. But we were in and out of the building enough for us to figure out that it was our favorite studio in town. When a tornado came through in the late nineties and damaged the roof, there was a little bit of a dispute between the landlord and the person who ran the studio. That ended with the building coming up for sale. Then it sat on the market for a couple years.

G.W.: Neil Young made “Comes a Time” there. The beginnings of Americana, before it was Americana—way before. The first coming together of country and bluegrass and folk.

My admittedly speculative sense is that Woodland is maybe a bit of a sacred space—I realize tornadoes and things of that nature are not remotely romantic or sacramental, but there’s something about its persistent physical survival that’s almost spooky.

D.R.: Since 1900, there have been three tornadoes that we know of that have gone through Nashville. And, if you look at the map that shows their paths, they’re virtually on the same vector. I mean, they barely cross. They’re almost parallel lines. But if you look at where all three of those tornadoes did cross—

G.W.: It’s Five Points. It’s our studio. It’s literally in the intersection. Every time, they come right over our studio.

What do you remember about the night of the 2020 tornado? It was just the two of you and your friend Glen Chausse, who was staying at the studio.

G.W.: I remember an almost miraculous strength, and a feeling of providence. I don’t know how we did what we managed to do. It was very chaotic and very scary. I grew up in California and was accustomed to huge wildfires, to just turning around seeing an entire hillside aflame. But this was dark and confusing—twelve thousand feet of pitch blackness. We didn’t know how much of the building had been compromised, because we couldn’t see. It was the middle of the night, and we knew that water was starting to come through, and so we kept moving stuff to a place we thought was safe. And when I say stuff, I mean so much stuff. All of our master tapes, all of our guitars. Everything. Our entire musical life.

D.R.: I remember listening. A lot of my memory from that night is auditory: listening to the water as the upper parts of the roof were starting to come down. It was just getting worse and worse, more and more intense. We were running into different rooms and trying to assess. I remember going into one room, just outside the tape vault, opening the door, and the ceiling came down. Like, O.K.—well, that one’s not good.

G.W.: We thought a corner of the “A” room—where, in the end, we made this record—was safe.

D.R.: It was an isolation booth that had its own ceiling. But, three hours later, the water’s getting all the way through. That was where we had put all the instruments. We had to move them again.

G.W.: It was a terrible feeling because it just got progressively worse.

D.R.: At the same time, we were unbelievably fortunate, because if we hadn’t been in town, if we’d been on the road, we would have lost pretty much all of it. We were able to be there; so many people never get that kind of a chance. There was so much calculus in trying to figure out what the next move was. I have one L.E.D. light that, if it hadn’t been charged, I don’t know what we would have done.

G.W.: We had that L.E.D. light and three iPhones.

D.R.: We were trying to call everyone we know, and of course, the phones didn’t work. You don’t realize how far out on the technological ledge you live, every single day of your life, until the power goes out.

G.W.: Communications go down, and then you are three people, alone, trying to save your life’s work.

D.R.: There are fifteen people who would have come over, but you can’t reach them, and they don’t know what’s happening.

Was there a moment in that process—running in and out, grabbing tape, grabbing guitars, dodging rubble, getting soaked—where you thought, We’re gonna get ourselves killed?

G.W.: I only had the thought of personal danger after the fact, when people were saying, “Thank goodness you guys are O.K. and didn’t get clobbered.” Honestly, in the moment, it never crossed my mind. It was just, Keep moving the guitars, keep moving the tapes. I did start to flip out at one point when the entire “A” room was standing water, and big chunks of ceiling were starting to come down, and we still had to get eight racks of guitars. We’d gotten them onto dollies, and we had to run this gauntlet through the six inches of water in the hallway, under sheets of cascading water, just going as fast as we could. I was really going into reptile-panic mode.

D.R.: I just kept thinking, Wow, it’s so interesting that this building has so many different ceilings!

It feels as though all of this could be generative in a dark way—a lesson in how to remain. That idea feels central—spiritually, lyrically—to the new record.

D.R.: The truth of it is, we were trying to tie that all in. We were already planning a nod to the tornado and the chaos. The working title of the project was “Empty Trainload of Sky.” But as we got closer to finishing the sequence, it crossed my mind that, since the tornado, I’ve been in that building fourteen to sixteen hours a day, every day, for five years. And so if anything had shaped the emotional content—

G.W.: It was Woodland. So much energy and effort and tears and sweat—and certainly a little blood—went into bringing it back again. We were so happy to not have it destroyed.