By Brian Wise
AN EVENING WITH GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS
Hamer Hall, Melbourne – January 28, 2025
The reverence of the audience for Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, on only their third tour here in 21 years, was akin to being in a cathedral rather than a concert hall. You know the expression ‘You could hear a pin drop’. Well, tonight, you could hear a pin drop! Melbourne audiences are renowned for their attention and reserve, but this verged on the reverential.
Only towards the end of the near two-hour show, broken by an interval, did the audience let loose with some raucousness as the acclaimed duo ramped up the energy. A few people even dared to dance. By the end of the concert, the first of five shows in Melbourne, you could have been forgiven for thinking you had just shared a religious experience. For the most part, people seemed stunned into silence by the sheer beauty of the music, the dazzling playing of David Rawlings and the strikingly emotive voice of Gillian Welch.
The sparse stage, adorned merely with a vase of flowers and guitars and banjo leaning against the table waiting to be picked up, was an indication of what would unfold. It was to be simple, unadorned and totally focused on the music. In fact, the evening was to be a mix of songs that Welch and Rawlings had recorded for albums under their own names, which are really mainly duo recordings anyway, as well selections from their latest album and a few familiar covers.
Arriving to a warm welcome the duo opened with ‘Elvis Presley Blues’ before introducing the Punch Brothers and Hawktail’s upright bass player Paul Kowert – who was to pop on and off stage during the night – and leaning into Rawling’s ‘Midnight Train’. This was followed by the haunting ‘Empty Trainload of Sky’, the opener to the latest album Woodland.
“We missed you,” yelled a lone voice from the audience to applause after the first song. Welch retorted, ‘We missed you too.” This was not a show heavy on repartee, the music did most of the talking.
When Welch picked up the banjo after the first bracket of songs, she did laugh that they were ‘almost out of tricks,’ and that Rawlings might take his jacket off later in the show (which he did to loud cheering). Not that they needed any tricks at all.
Welch and Rawlings have been making music together for so long that they play and sing almost as one. The harmonies emanating from the duo capture the emotion in every song. Welch also provided the rhythm on guitar or banjo while Rawlings headed off on exciting excursions on his 1935 Epiphone Olympic archtop, the sound of which is incredibly distinctive.
At times he seemed to go off on a tangent searching for a way back to the body of the song. At other times he seemed to be gently wrestling the guitar into submission to force the notes out as he swayed back and forth. Each solo that decorated a song was greeted with loud applause. It seems evident to me that, like David Lindley, he never plays exactly the same solo to a song twice – each one is subtly different.
‘Wayside/ Back in Time’ and ‘The Way It Goes’ were glorious enough in the first set but were matched by the beautiful ‘North Country’ from the new album, which seems like an instant classic and keeps prompting me to think that it could be a sequel to Dylan’s ‘Girl from The North Country’. When Welch was singing these songs, and later with ‘What We Had’, her voice has the capacity to truly capture the ineffable sadness of the lyrics as if she has truly experienced these emotions and is transmitting this to the listeners.
By the time the first part of the show had ended, with Rawlings’ up tempo ‘Ruby’ and Welch’s ‘Caleb Meyer,’ fifty minutes had flown by under the spell of this mesmerising duo.
The second set began with four songs from Woodland: ‘Lawman’; the melancholic ‘What We Had’; ‘Hashtag’; and, ‘The Day the Mississippi Died’. These were interspersed with Welch’s ‘Hard Times’ (which in the light of recent event now seems prophetic).
We were then treated to a new and as yet unrecorded song, ‘Lazarus’, which is said to something of a tribute musically to the Grateful Dead. This was an unexpected and delightful bonus perhaps indicating that there is another studio album on the way a little sooner than the abnormal gap prior to Woodland.
While ‘Red Clay Halo’ closed the show and got the audience on its feet, it was the merely prelude to three encores. After Jesse Fuller’s ‘The Monkey and The Engineer’ and ‘Look at Miss Ohio’, the audience finally found its mojo and really joined in on ‘I’ll Fly Away’, which captured the religious-like fervour of the audience and the joy of the show.
The second encore offered the absolutely timeless ‘Revelator’, still as inspiring as in its first incarnation more than 24 years ago. Finally, ‘Midnight Bones’ and the classic ‘Jackson’ closed the evening leaving the audience in no doubt of the talent they had just witnessed.
In the course of the evening, the duo also achieved something most musicians are rarely able to achieve. The set list of 24 songs consisted of seven songs from their most recent album, Woodland, released just five months ago. The latest songs fit neatly into the setlist, and it is obvious that the audience have already absorbed them. After nearly 30 years making music, they don’t have to rely on the ‘hits’ (mainly because they haven’t had any) but can create a unique set list each evening and showcase their latest creativity (a la Bob Dylan).
And having mentioned Bob Dylan, the line from ‘Ballad of A Thin Man’ came to mind after the show: ‘There’s something happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr Jones?.” Consider that Welch and Rawlings are playing five nights at the 2500 seat Hamer Hall, having played 3 nights at the Sydney Opera House. Tyler Childers is about to tour to sellout crowds, including the Myer Music Bowl. Something is definitely happening here and it is not reflected in any way at all in the mainstream media, either print or radio. It is only to be found in community radio and to a lesser extent the ABC. If it is a cult, it is a rapidly growing one. Maybe it is a religion!
PS: There are still some tickets for sale for Sunday February 2 at Hamer Hall. If you haven’t seen them yet beg, borrow or steal a ticket. It could be the best concert you will see this year.
SETLIST
- Elvis Presley Blues
- Midnight Train
- Empty Trainload of Sky
- Cumberland Gap
- Wayside / Back in Time
- Howdy Howdy
- The Way It Goes
- North Country
- Ruby
- Caleb Meyer
Set 2:
- Lawman
- What We Had
- Hard Times
- Hashtag
- The Day the Mississippi Died
- The Way It Will Be
- Lazarus (new)
- Red Clay Halo
Encore 1:
- The Monkey and the Engineer
- Look at Miss Ohio
- I’ll Fly Away
Encore 2:
- Revelator
Encore 3:
- Midnight Bones
- Jackson