New Album Coming Down the Track From Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings

In one of the very best kinds of surprises, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings announced a new album today.

Woodland, from the duo’s own Acony Records, is coming Aug. 23. The album is named for their Woodland Studios in East Nashville, which was heavily damaged in a tornado in 2020.

“Woodland is at the heart of everything we do, and has been for the last twenty some years,” they said in a press release announcing the album. “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.”

They offered a taste of the record, their 10th studio album, with a new song, “Empty Trainload of Sky,” a laid-back groove with gentle drums propelling things forward:

Welch and Rawlings also announced a slew of tour dates in the US this fall. Their July shows in New England are sold out. They’ll have the closing set at Newport Folk Festival next weekend.

Woodland is the duo’s first album of new songs since 2011’s The Harrow & The Harvest. (Rawlings released Poor David’s Almanack under his name in 2017.) In 2020 they released a series of demo recordings titled Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs (ND story) and All the Good Times, an album of covers they recorded during the early pandemic lockdown that won the 2021 Grammy for Best Folk Album.

Here’s the track listing for Woodland:

1. Empty Trainload of Sky
2. What We Had
3. Lawman
4. The Bells and The Birds
5. North Country
6. Hashtag
7. The Day the Mississippi Died
8. Turf the Gambler
9. Here Stands a Woman
10. Howdy Howdy