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Gillian Welch and David Rawlings: Woodland review – 10 exquisite songs of loss and love


Named after their Nashville studio, hit by a tornado in 2020, the duo’s first album together in 13 years picks its impeccable, old-time way through personal and social upheaval

That same year, Welch and Rawlings united their names for a quarantine covers album, All the Good Times, which sought to bring succour and long-range musical perspective to the upheavals they, and everyone else, had experienced. There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to Covid – “Caught it like a new form of the flu” – on Hashtag, a track from Woodland that usefully points up these two extraordinary artists’ playful relationship with merging old and new. Named after the river that emblematically unites north and south and features in umpteen songs, it starts merrily enough, with fiddle from Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor to the fore.

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David Rawlings

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Gillian Welch

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