Time (The Revelations)
Nashville’s enigmatic folk queen salvages 48 unheard classics from her archives. Gillian Welch ★★★★ Boots No 2: The Lost Songs Volumes 1-3 ACONY. CD/DL/LP
IT TAKES quite some courage for a perfectionist to reveal their rough sketches. The songs that Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings have released these past 25 years might affect the unadorned simplicity of folk tradition, but their creation often involves a long and agonising quest for clarity. “Until a song is right, Dave and I basically exist in a state of misery, and a constant – I mean a never-ending – process of problemsolving.” she told me in 2011, as her last collection of original songs, The Harrow & The Harvest, arrived. It had been eight years since her previous record, Soul Journey, but as she explained, “We never wrote anything that we liked. Any number of people would have put out three, four records in this span, and we could have too. There were songs. We didn’t stop. But we were usually too pissed off with stuff to even record it.”
2020, though, has meant even the most secretive and fastidious artists have been forced to rethink their normal practices.
The year for Welch and Rawlings began with the roof of their East Nashville studio being ripped off by a tornado, necessitating a mission to salvage their archive before it was destroyed by rainwater. Emboldened with an uncharacteristic urgency to share their motherlode, they soon decided to release a marathon demo session from one weekend in December 2002. The 48 tracks, organised into three volumes for Boots No 2: The Lost Songs, represent a treasure trove of unheard Welch and Rawlings gems in their formative state, before all that “problem-solving” kicks in.
The truth about many perfectionists, of course, is that only they can see the perceived flaws in their work. So it is with these 48 songs, hastily extracted from Welch’s notebooks and recorded in 2002 to fulfil a publishing contract, a few months before Soul Journey’s release. What codes as loose, semi-finished ideas to them sound very much like perfectly-judged and completed songs to the rest of us – not least Solomon Burke and Alison Krauss, who rescued a couple of tunes (Valley Of Tears and Wouldn’t Be So Bad) for their own records.
Soul Journey, unusual in the Welch discography, turned out to be mostly a fullband affair. The Lost Songs, predictably, cuts to their usual essence: two acoustic guitars and two calm, undemonstrative voices braided around one another. As with All The Good Times, the lockdown covers album Welch and Rawlings released this past summer, the intimacy is a given. The profligacy of so many exceptional rejected songs, though, is staggering.
The first two volumes of The Lost Songs, released in July and September, are consequently heavy on highlights: tender character studies, like Strange Isabella and Chinatown, that could’ve slipped effortlessly onto 2001’s Time (The Revelator); Picasso, a plaintive country blues good enough for a few Welch and Rawlings live sets over the years; the slow swagger and drone of Fair September, a clear descendant of English folk. Especially notable: Happy Mother’s Day, a greetings card jingle of unexpected poignancy, recorded around the time Welch, adopted daughter of a Los Angeles showbiz couple, discovered her unnamed birth mother had been an Appalachian girl studying in New York.
The forthcoming Volume 3 magically sustains that quality (all three instalments are corralled together for CD and vinyl box sets due in December). Here you’ll find elegantly rowdy rockabilly (Turn It Up); torchy Hot Club jazz (What Can I Do?); a Native American elegy to stand alongside Neil Young’s Pocahontas (Peace In The Valley); plus How’s About You, a Hank Williamsesque charmer that surfaced in 2009 on Rawlings’ first solo album.
Finally, there’s One Little Song, the sole Welch original here deemed worthy of a place on Soul Journey – marvellous, though not discernibly superior to most of its abandoned siblings. For Boots No 2 is both generous and tantalising, a massive expansion of the Welch/ Rawlings canon that leaves you ungratefully hungry for more. How many other great lost songs, you can’t help thinking, have fallen by the wayside in the past two decades?