The Best Thing I Heard this Week-Gillian Welch

Eight years. Eight years! It was eight years between albums by Gillian Welch, a time period so long that a whole generation of music has come and gone in the time between. Of course, with music as soulful and reverent as The Harrow and the Harvest, eight years is but the strum of a chord. While Welch told the Onion A/V Club that most of the time was spent being unable to craft songs that she and collaborator/virtuoso David Rawlings felt were up to snuff, each track here sounds like it was painstakingly developed over eight years. Created and refined to the point of perfection, The Harrow and the Harvest is likely the closest thing to a flawless album that we will see in 2011.

The word “timeless” is thrown around a lot in music, a compliment of the highest order, and I imagine it will be thrown around quite a few times in regard to this record. But, here, I don’t think it fully captures what Welch has done on this record. This music is more, I don’t know, full of time than anything else. When you hear the percussion on “Six White Horses,” (hand claps and leg slaps), the feeling is ancient but appropriate, a perfect fit for that moment but also one that pays tribute to the roots of this record. Other homages to Welch’s roots play well (my personal favorite-- “that’s the way the cornbread crumbles”), coming off genuine rather than inauthentic or corny.

The substantial quality of this record rests on the collaboration between Welch and Rawlings, interestingly portrayed as Adam & Eve-like characters on the record cover, presenting not only the dichotomy between the two, but also between many of the other characters or pieces of the record. On “Scarlet Town,” Welch sings of her time there “you slept on the feather bed / I slept on the floor.” In “Dark Turn of Mind,” she tells us that “some girls are bright as the morning / and some have a dark turn of mind.” Other dualities litter the record.



The play of Rawlings is key to the dichotomy as well. Without his masterful touch on this record, it would have been a group of beautiful stories but little else. He knows exactly when to slow down or speed up the pace for Welch, and does so wonderfully. The duality is important. Many records, even ones without “technical” flaws, fail because they end up being too monotone.

The aspect of the time lapse between records that astounds me most is the patience required on the part of Welch and Rawlings. To go eight years without a successful product in one’s profession is a test of not only wills, but self-worth to be sure. I looked up what “harrow” meant on Wikipedia, and the entry read that “Harrowing is often carried out on fields to follow the rough finish left by ploughing operations. The purpose of this harrowing is...to provide a finer finish.” Welch and Rawlings spent 8 years harrowing this record for us, and we are (thankfully) getting to harvest the result--a finely crafted record, one steeped in tradition, but not lost in it. Certainly the best thing I heard this week.

Also listen to: Tennessee, The Way it Goes

Photo by Judy H