As the stories I write tend to adopt the weather conditions prevailing at the time they come into being, so they often become irredeemably associated with a certain album or piece of music. I must have listened to Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ concerto about thirty times when I was writing ‘The Muse of Copenhagen,’ five times in succession on some days. I can’t always have music playing when I am writing – if a first draft especially is proving difficult it is dangerously distracting – but while second-drafting it is a wonderful stimulus.
The odd thing about it is that it seems to be the stories themselves that guide my choice of music, that demand the concentrated absorption in certain pieces that only obsessively repeated listenings can bring. I’ve been working on the second draft of ‘Rewind’ this week, and the story will now be forever associated for me with The Harrow and the Harvest, the hypnotically sublime new album from the alt-country singer Gillian Welch.
Gillian Welch became famous when she guested on the soundtrack album of the Coen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou. She is an infamous perfectionist. Fans of her music have been waiting eight years for a new album – she simply won’t put anything out unless she feels on a gut level that it’s the best work she can produce at that given moment. As someone who found her 2001 post-O Brother album Time (The Revelator) as close to being a perfect piece of work as it is possible to produce, I have to admit I was a little disappointed by her 2003 follow up, Soul Journey. It wasn’t that I didn’t love it – there were some great individual songs on it, and I’ll listen with pleasure to anything Gillian sings in any case. But for me at least it had a bit of a commercial feel about it, and the tracks simply did not fit together the way the tracks on Time did. In its marvellous coherence, Time is like a set of linked short stories; Soul Journey felt more like a ‘best of.’
So I was apprehensive as well as excited when I heard that Gillian finally had a new album out. Could it possibly be as great as Time, or would it be another Soul Journey, enjoyable but not quite it?
I think if I tell you I’ve listened to The Harrow and The Harvest approximately twenty times in the last three days I think you’ll guess my answer to that question: Gillian Welch and her partner Dave Rawlings are at the top of their form, and this gorgeous album is worth every day of the nine-year wait.
How can I dsecribe her music, except to say that Gillian Welch is a natural born storyteller. The thing that’s most often said of her tracks is that they have the sense of being already old, of being handed down for generations among the musician-families of the Appalacians and the Adirondacks. I can’t add to that really because it’s true. The songs are like cross-stitch samplers, or patchwork quilts, the story as much in the making, in the texture of the warp and weft, as in the recounting of specific events.
Her language, both musical and verbal, is strong, simple, direct. The images she conveys are arresting and often stark. Yet there is a tenderness and poetry in the rendition that grabs at the heart.
The Harrow and The Harvest is not lighter than Time, but its silks are finer. If Time (The Revelator) reminds me of Wisconsin Death Trip, Harrow reminds me of Tarnation. The lyrics and rhythms of my favourite tracks – the central triptych of ‘The Way it Will Be,’ ‘The Way it Goes,’ and ‘Tennessee’ – already feel like they have been in my life for years.
Gillian Welch is a writer’s musician. Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait another decade for her next album.
Just started reading: Mr Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi. Loving it so far, magical and funny and assured.
Walking: along the Stade, with echoes of Daphne…..
