Advertisement
 
YOU ARE HERE: LAT HomeCollectionsPop_review
(Page 2 of 2)

Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings have four things going for them

And those two voices and two guitars are all it takes. The duo play the Music Box in Hollywood on Friday behind their first album in eight years, 'The Harrow & the Harvest.'

September 27, 2011|By Scott Timberg, Special to the Los Angeles Times

"This is something that Dave and I kind of inherited from that tradition," she says. "As a duet, you do everything in your power to change the texture of what you're doing — you're constantly fighting stasis. You only have four things" — two guitars, two voices. "This is part of why we gravitated to the dissonance in our music — why Dave will often sing dissonant intervals."

In a lot of ways, this duo — two nocturnal musicians who walk around their adopted hometown of Nashville after midnight, dreaming of the ghost of the Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley and Hank Williams — has come full circle.

"When we started down this road, around the time of 'Revival,'" Rawlings says, "we felt we were very much alone in the acoustic wilderness. There wasn't a lot of stuff that we felt connected to us. Celine Dion was cutting the 'Titanic' vocal in the studio while we were making our little record. We just felt like freaks.

"It's surprising to look up years later and see all these people working in this genre — Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Mumford and Sons. It's surprising to see us and go, 'Whoa, we're veterans.'"

calendar@latimes.com

Advertisement
Los Angeles Times Articles
|
|
|