Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have announced their first new album since 2020. The new album, Woodland, is out on August 23 via the duo’s Acony Records. Leading the follow-up to the All the Good Times covers collection is a new song called “Empty Trainload of Sky.” Find it, along with the musicians’ upcoming U.S. tour dates, below.
Welch and Rawlings recorded their new album at their own Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville. “Woodland is at the heart of everything we do, and has been for the last 20 some years,” the folk artists said in a press statement. “The past four years were spent almost entirely within its walls, bringing it back to life after the 2020 tornado and making this record. The music is (songs are) a swirl of contradictions, emptiness, fullness, joy, grief, destruction, permanence. Now.”
Woodland is Gillian Welch’s first album of original material since 2011’s The Harrow & the Harvest, and Rawlings’ first since 2017’s Poor David’s Almanack. (While billed as solo LPs, Welch and Rawlings were heavily involved in the making of each others’ records.) Since those releases, the musicians have won a Grammy Award for Best Folk Album and been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song (for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings”). They also issued the three-volume archival collection Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs.
Read the Sunday Review of Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator).
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Woodland:
01 Empty Trainload of Sky
02 What We Had
03 Lawman
04 The Bells and the Birds
05 North Country
06 Hashtag
07 The Day the Mississippi Died
08 Turf the Gambler
09 Here Stands a Woman
10 Howdy Howdy
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings:
07-23 South Burlington, VT – Higher Ground
07-24 Northampton, MA – Iron Horse Music Hall
07-25 Northampton, MA – Iron Horse Music Hall
07-27 Newport, RI – Newport Folk Festival
09-04 Bowling Green, KY – Southern Kentucky Performing Arts Center
09-05 Bloomington, IN – The Bluebird
09-06 Evanston, IL – Cahn Auditorium
09-08 Madison, WI – The Orpheum Theater
09-09 Saint Paul, MN – The Fitzgerald Theater
09-10 Saint Paul, MN – The Fitzgerald Theater
09-12 Des Moines, IA – Hoyt Sherman Place
09-14 La Vista, NE – The Astro
09-15 Kansas City, MO – Folly Theater
09-16 St. Louis, MO – The Sheldon
10-13 Birmingham, AL – The Lyric Theatre
10-14 Atlanta, GA – Atlanta Symphony Hall
10-15 Charlotte, NC – Knight Theater
10-17 Boone, NC – The Schaefer Center for the Performing Arts
10-18 Knoxville, TN – Bijou Theatre
10-19 Asheville, NC – Thomas Wolfe Auditorium
10-21 Charleston, SC – Charleston Music Hall
10-23 Saxapahaw, NC – Haw River Ballroom
10-24 Saxapahaw, NC – Haw River Ballroom
11-20 Louisville, KY – The Brown Theatre
11-21 Cincinnati, OH – Taft Theatre
11-22 Detroit, MI – The Masonic Temple
11-23 Akron, OH – Goodyear Theater
11-25 Pittsburgh, PA – Byham Theater
11-26 Ithaca, NY – State Theatre of Ithaca
11-27 Troy, NY – Troy Savings Bank Music Hall
11-30 Kingston, NY – Ulster Performing Arts Center
12-01 Boston, MA – The Wilbur
12-03 Portland, ME – State Theatre
12-05 Port Chester, NY – The Capitol Theatre
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