GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS SHARE NEW SONG “HASHTAG”
WOODLAND, THEIR 10th STUDIO ALBUM, OUT AUGUST 23rd
VIA ACONY RECORDS
ANNOUNCE NEW US TOUR DATES IN CITIES INCLUDING SAXAPAHAW, PHILADELPHIA, BALTIMORE, AND MORE
TICKETS ON SALE NOW HERE
ALBUM COVER CREDIT: ALYSSE GAFKJEN
“There’s that harmony blend that no-one else can achieve besides these two.
They are so influential…”
-NPR Music
“…modern masters of American folk.”
– Pitchfork
“The protectors of the American folk song.”
– Rolling Stone
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, whom the New York Times has hailed as “American folk masters,” have shared their new song “Hashtag” from their 10th studio album, Woodland, which will be released via their label, Acony Records digitally on August 23rd. Said Welch about the new song: “We wrote Hashtag for Guy Clark. Guy taught us what it was like on the road. He took us out opening for him all over the states, to our first shows in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and South Carolina. He showed us the parallel universe of the troubadour.” The song follows the album’s first single “Empty Trainload Of Sky.” Listen to Hashtag here.
Welch and Rawlings have also announced additional US tour dates in Saxapahaw, Philadelphia, Baltimore and more. They will headline previously announced US shows in September and October in cities including St Paul, Kansas City, Atlanta, and more (full dates below). These upcoming dates will be some of their first public performances since appearing on 2019’s Oscars and the pair will announce additional dates throughout 2024 and 2025. The new dates will go on sale on Friday, Aug 16 at 10am local here, and previously announce dates are on sale now here.
Woodland was named for and recorded at Welch and Rawlings’ own Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, TN. Of the album and studio they said, “Woodland is at the heart of everything we do, and has been for the last twenty some years. 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.” The new 10-song collection mingles full band tracks with intricate duet performances all tied together with the duo’s signature sound and lyricism and cements the pair’s iconoclastic position at the forefront of acoustic music.
Woodland is their first album since 2020’s All the Good Times, a collection of covers and classic folk songs which earned the duo the 2021 GRAMMY Award for Best Folk Album, and their first album of new original music since 2017’s Poor David’s Almanack. Pre-order or pre-save Woodland https://gillianwelch-davidrawlings.lnk.to/Woodland_UK. Vinyl and CD are available to preorder today from the Acony Records Online Store, and the album will be available worldwide on all formats later this fall.
Welch and Rawlings returned to Fort Adams State Park in Newport, RI where they closed the festival main stage at the historic Newport Folk Festival. Rolling Stone said of the set: “the two singers presented a career-spanning set that leaned heavily on never-before-heard material from the duo’s forthcoming album Woodland. However daring a decision it was to debut this hushed new material during a headlining festival set, Rawlings and Welch earned it many times over… by the time Rawlings played his signature medley of “I Hear Them All” and “This Land Is Your Land,” the duo was receiving the type of rapturous response they deserved.”
GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS- WOODLAND TRACK LISTING
- Empty Trainload Of Sky
- What We Had
- Lawman
- The Bells And The Birds
- North Country
- Hashtag
- The Day The Mississippi Died
- Turf The Gambler
- Here Stands A Woman
- Howdy Howdy
GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS TOUR DATES (NEW DATES IN BOLD)
Sept 04 – Bowling Green, KY at SKyPAC
Sept 05 – Bloomington, IN at The Bluebird
Sept 06 – Evanston, IL at Cahn Auditorium SOLD OUT
Sept 08 – Madison, WI at The Orpheum Theater
Sept 09 – St Paul, MN at The Fitzgerald Theater
Sept 10 – St Paul, MN at The Fitzgerald Theater
Sept 12 – Des Moines, IA at Hoyt Sherman Place
Sept 14 – La Vista, NE at The Astro
Sept 15 – Kansas City, MO at Folly Theater
Sept 16 – St Louis, MO at The Sheldon SOLD OUT
Oct 13 – Birmingham, AL at The Lyric Theatre SOLD OUT
Oct 14 – Atlanta, GA at Atlanta Symphony Hall
Oct 15 – Charlotte, NC at Knight Theater
Oct 17 – Boone, NC at The Schaefer Center for the Performing Arts (On Sale Soon)
Oct 18 – Knoxville, TN at Bijou Theatre SOLD OUT
Oct 19 – Asheville, NC at Thomas Wolfe Auditorium
Oct 21 – Charleston, SC at Charleston Music Hall
Oct 23 – Saxapahaw, NC at Haw River Ballroom SOLD OUT
Oct 24 – Saxapahaw, NC at Haw River Ballroom SOLD OUT
Oct 25 – Saxapahaw, NC at Haw River Ballroom
Nov 20 – Louisville, KY at The Brown Theatre
Nov 21 – Cincinnati, OH at Taft Theatre
Nov 22 – Detroit, MI at The Masonic Temple
Nov 23 – Akron, OH at Goodyear Theater
Nov 25 – Pittsburgh, PA at Byham Theater
Nov 26 – Ithaca, NY at State Theatre of Ithaca
Nov 27 – Troy, NY at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall
Nov 30 – Kingston, NY at Ulster Performing Arts Center
Dec 1 – Boston, MA at The Wilbur SOLD OUT
Dec 02 – Concord, NH at Chubb Theatre
Dec 3 – Portland, ME at State Theatre SOLD OUT
Dec 5 – Port Chester, NY at The Capitol Theatre
Dec 06 – Philadelphia, PA at Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts – Zellerbach Auditorium
Dec 07 – Baltimore, MD at The Lyric Baltimore
Dec 08 – Tysons, VA at Capital One Hall
PRESS PHOTO CREDIT: ALYSSE GAFKJEN
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. They have been hailed by Pitchfork as “modern masters of American folk” and “protectors of the American folk song” by Rolling Stone.
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. Firmly on the roots music map following the release, 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.