The first surprise in Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ current tour is the stage: bare, with just a couple sets of microphones for guitar and voice, and a table between them for water. Rather than rely on a band or other equipment, they’ve stripped everything down to honest voice and guitar—and their show, which played the Capital One Hall in Tysons Corner, VA Sunday, was all the stronger for it.
Already, Welch’s alluring song craft and plaintive, melodic voice that’s produced a handful of great albums, her harmonies with her partner Rawlings enhance the songs, but they rise to a new dimension when he begins soloing on his trusty 1935 Epiphone Olympic, which has a small wooden body but a big, bright sound.
It approaches the sound of a mandolin when he’s playing fast, but more often he’s taking time to invent strikingly original solos and runs within the confines of songs that may not have come directly from classic string bands but sounds as if they could have.
He’ll shake the guitar as if to wring the right sound out of it, or wag his head when he isn’t shaking his instrument. Almost like magic, he never touched another guitar all night, using the mahogany and pine fronted arch top from beginning to end, playing to a microphone instead of being plugged in and never even stopping to tune very often.
Welch was doing her part with rhythms and more than once pulled out a banjo to some unnecessary acclaim. They concentrated on the songs from their recent album together Woodland, but had more than enough songs from their catalogs, together and apart, to fill two sets and two sets of encores.
Being a duo they are flexible to throw different things in each night, starting this one with “Tear My Stillhouse Down” from her 1996 Revival. Though it sounded great, they seemed to have found some wrong turns in their performance that few others seemed to notice. “Always good to start with a laugh,” she said. “We haven’t played that one in 20 years.”
In black cowboy boots and a spaghetti-strapped simple black dress on her thin frame, she evoked a figure from a Dorothea Lange photograph, playing music solidly rooted in the same Dust Bowl era, except that all of it was original, save for the familiar singalong that closed their first encore.
“I’ll Fly Away,” Albert E. Brumley’s 1929 gospel and bluegrass standard is probably Welch’s (and the song’s) most widely known performance, from her duet of it with Alison Krauss on the soundtrack album (and subsequent live recording) for the Cohen brothers film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?
But Welch’s own songs are questioning and pointed in a contemporary way that belies their excellently played and sung traditional sounds. In her “Everything is Free,” their single offering for their second encore, she muses about the life of the musician in the era of freely traded songs on the internet. Lately, it’s been performed by other musicians in the Spotify era, including Father John Misty, Courtney Barnett, and Phoebe Bridgers. “Everything is free now,” it goes. “Gotta give it all away.”
Yet it was written in the Napster days of 2001 on Time (The Revelator), whose title song was another highlight of the concert, with a spiraling Rawlings solo that suggested Prince. A new song from Woodland had a modern title “Hashtag” but admitted “the news would be bad if I ever saw your name with a hashtag.” More telling was the next line: “Singers like you and I / are only news when we die.”
Yet that shouldn’t be the case; the theater was sold out, the audience clearly loving it and songs like “Empty Trainload of the Sky,” pointing out the positive power of negative space in a bare, bypassing boxcar, only heightened their appeal.
Rawlings wore the kind of cowboy boots and hat he might wear anywhere; it wasn’t for show. He brought fewer of his songs, probably because he’s put out fewer albums. And while his harmonies with Welch were spot-on, when he was solo his vocals took odd turns and occasional falsetto. Clearly, his terrific guitar was his strong suit and it was tough to equal the warm grace of Welch’s voice.
As a performer, he also seemed like the nicest guy around. When someone sneezed in the front row during one of his songs, his urge to bless him caused him to pause during a verse.
There was very little discussion between songs, letting the deceptively simple songs take the center stage they deserve. The two were not always alone on stage; Paul Kowert of the Punch Brothers, Hawktail, and the David Rawlings Machine, brought his double bass on stage to add some bottom to songs and a dark undertow when he used the bow.
The three were aided by an excellent sound in the room. And despite the three story Christmas tree in the theater’s lobby, there was no hint of the holidays in the set.
