Time (The Revelator)

Welch, Gillian

album cover

Timeless Truth-Telling

Gillian Welch begins this journey with a song about identity, how it is shaped and transformed, and how only time can reveal who's genuine and who's "queen of the fakes and imitators." It's helpful to keep those cautionary words in mind as the rest of Time unfolds. They serve as a preamble, of sorts, for Welch's delicate inquiry—sketches and portraits of people caught in the middle of various deceptions, haunted by memories they can't shake and otherwise messed with by Papa Time. The weary-voiced singer and songwriter's two previous albums brought postmodern lyrical ideas to old-timey Appalachian balladry. With this work, she goes beyond being an imitator. She pours the forthright tone associated with the legendary Carter Family into songs shot through with modern ambivalence, poetic accounts of cell phone–tethered life. These range from meditations on faulty memory ("My First Lover," whom she describes as "tall and breezy with his long hair down, but he gets a little hazy when I think of him now") to a fable about rock and roll heroism ("Elvis Presleys Blues") to an expression of near biblical wanderlust ("I Dream a Highway," which lasts over fourteen minutes and invokes Lazarus, Gram Parsons, and Emmylou Harris).

Welch was born in Manhattan. She calls her style "American Primitive," though critics consider her a catalyst of the alternativecountry "Americana" style. Her songs are rustic and at the same time gimlet-eyed, wise about the world. Both Welch and her musical partner David Rawlings sing and play guitar; she strums placidly while he scatters terse jabs and gingham-print chords all over the place. Their voices intertwine beautifully, with Rawlings sometimes supplying high, hollowed-out harmonies that provide an extra shot of lonesomeness.

After being hailed and scorned for the scholarly appropriations of her first two records, Welch made other changes this time around—she told one interviewer that she conceived this as a set of rock songs, to be played on acoustic instruments. Even when the mood is front-porch plaintive, Welch's songs speak to a moment being lived right now, not some quaint olden-days curio. Changing lanes between pensive balladry and wrenching blues, Welch and Rawlings create hazy out-of-time dream sequences that belong to no one genre. But speak the truths of many.

Genre: Country
Released: 2001, Almo Sounds
Key Tracks: "Dear Someone," "Ruination Day, Part 2," "Revelator," "I Dream a Highway."
Catalog Choice: Hell Among the Yearlings
Next Stop: Iris DeMent: Infamous Angel
After That: Victoria Williams: Loose
Book Page: 852