GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS
ANNOUNCE OCTOBER 2025 UK & IRELAND LIVE DATES
THEIR FIRST HEADLINE TOUR ON THESE SHORES SINCE 2011
ONLY EUROPEAN SHOWS FOR 2025
GRAMMY AWARD WINNING ALBUM WOODLAND OUT NOW
Credit: Alysse Gafkjen
“When Gillian Welch and David Rawlings sing together, it feels as if our hectic world stops turning” – The Sun
“Never is it more moving than when they are simply playing together” – Uncut
“How Welch and Rawlings can sound so steeped in timeless tradition and yet so in the moment here and now is one of the musical miracles of our times.” – Hi-Fi News
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings have announced long awaited live dates for the UK and Ireland in October 2025. This marks their first headline tour this side of the pond since 2011’s run in support of that year’s The Harrow & The Harvest album.
Following the release of their lauded new record Woodland (Acony), which scooped the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Folk album and graced many Best of the Year lists, the duo will play Dublin, Manchester, London and Glasgow in what is sure to be one of the most highly anticipated tours this year. Dates, which will be the only European shows in 2025, are as follows:
Weds 22 Oct DUBLIN Vicar Street
Thur 23 Oct DUBLIN Vicar Street
Sat 25 Oct MANCHESTER O2 Apollo
Sun 26 Oct LONDON Palladium
Mon 27 Oct LONDON Palladium
Weds 29 Oct GLASGOW Royal Concert Hall
Tickets on-sale Friday, March 14 at 10 am local: https://www.gillianwelch-davidrawlings.com/
Welch & Rawlings, whom the New York Times has hailed as “American folk masters,” are widely recognised as leading exponents of their genre, with every new release a notable event. Their 10th studio album Woodland (2024), now available on all formats, was named for and recorded at their own Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, which they rebuilt following the devastation of the 2020 tornado. The new 10-song collection mingles full band tracks with intricate duet performances all tied together with the duo’s signature sound and lyricism.
The vinyl edition of Woodland is mastered by David Rawlings directly from the original analog master tapes to his custom Neumann VMS-80 lathe. Acony Records is proud to be partnering with the all-new Paramount Pressing & Plating, a joint venture between Rawlings and esteemed plating craftsman Gary Salstrom, to produce superior vinyl records. Paramount Pressing, located in Denver, CO and built from the ground up from Salstrom’s specifications, is dedicated to producing the highest quality vinyl records available, using state of the art Pheenix Alpha and Viryl presses and the experience of some of the greatest record pressing engineers and record producers in the business.
Alongside the Best Folk Album Grammy in 2025 (their third Grammy), the duo won International Album of the Year and International Single of the Year for Woodland and its lead single “Empty Trainload Of Sky” at the 2025 UK Americana Awards. On its release, Woodland was greeted with widespread praise, from The Observer to The Sun, The Times to The Mirror, and triumphed in the UK music press, including Albums of the Year in Uncut (#2), Mojo (#4, #1 in Americana), Songlines (#1, Americas) and Classic Rock.
About Gillian Welch and David Rawlings:
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are pillars of the modern acoustic music world, and their rich and remarkable careers span over twenty-five years.
After moving to Nashville in the 1990s, Welch was launched into the public consciousness when Emmylou Harris recorded a cover of Welch’s “Orphan Girl.” Her career continued to flourish as her 1996 debut Revival, produced by T Bone Burnett, was released to critical acclaim. Welch and Rawlings followed up that GRAMMY nominated album release with 1998’s Hell Among The Yearlings, a stark duet record that further solidified the duo as a force in the folk music scene.
In 2000, Welch was awarded the Album of the Year GRAMMY for her work as Associate Producer as well as a performer and songwriter on the eight times platinum O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack. Welch and Rawlings were simultaneously nominated for Time (The Revelator) which Rolling Stone called one of the best albums of the 2000s and is widely considered by critics and fans to be one of the best albums of all time.
Beginning with Time (The Revelator), all of Welch and Rawlings albums have been self-produced and self-released on their own record label, Acony Records, helping to establish the duo’s fierce commitment to independent music.
2003’s Soul Journey was the pair’s first experimentation with a fuller, electric sound, which paved the way for the Dave Rawlings Machine project, and their first release under Rawlings’ name (A Friend of A Friend, 2009), which was accompanied by a time period of heavy touring and headlining major festivals.
The Harrow and The Harvest returned to the duet sound and was nominated for Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Engineered Album at the 2012 GRAMMYs and won Artist of the Year (Welch) and Instrumentalist of the Year (Rawlings) at the Americana Honors & Awards. The album garnered glowing reviews and topped multiple year end “Best Of” lists.
Nashville Obsolete, the last project to be released as Dave Rawlings Machine in 2015, showcased Rawlings’ expanding pallet as a producer with more lavish arrangements, strings, and guest musicians. He also produced albums by Willie Watson, Dawes, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Robyn Hitchcock. “Cumberland Gap” from Poor David’s Almanack in 2017 was nominated for Best American Roots Song and was featured in Guy Ritchie’s film The Gentlemen and has since become one of the duo’s highest streaming songs.
In celebration of the twenty-year anniversary of the Welch-Rawlings partnership, the two launched an archival branch of Acony Records, entitled Boots, dedicated to releasing outtakes, demos, bootlegs, and live recordings from their copious vault. Thus far they have released five album’s worth of music with more on the way.
In 2018, Welch was the first musician to receive the Thomas Wolfe Prize for Literature. The award is bestowed by University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Department of English & Comparative Literature and recognizes contemporary writers with a distinguished body of work. 2019 saw Welch and Rawlings nominated for an Academy Award for “Best Original Song” where they performed their singing cowboy duet live on the Oscars. “When A Cowboy Trades His Spurs For Wings” was written for the Coen brothers’ film The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs. In 2020, the duo released All the Good Times, the first album under both their names, and won the GRAMMY for the Best Folk Album.
Recently, they were crowned with the Berklee American Masters Award and honored by Americana Music Association with a Lifetime Achievement for Songwriting.