Gillian Welch
Time (The Revelator) (Acony)
by Marc Hirsh
Gillian Welch
Time (The Revelator) (Acony)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002
Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) is so good that even specific bothersome features that immediately tripped my mental alarm system upon appearance ultimately result in transcendent moments, making my initial concerns ill-founded. The benefits so immeasurably outweigh the debits that it's like a chess player who makes what appears to be a bad opening gambit only to have it revealed, many moves later, as the disguised setup for an inevitable checkmate. I'll be, my thoughts go, she knew what she was doing all along.
I started out with reservations, for instance, about the harmony vocals provided by the utterly invaluable David Rawlings, whose range, tone and timbre are so indistinguishable from the voice of his partner that it sounds for all the world like two Gillians pining away together when one would probably do just fine (this is, after all, a record so basic as never to offer, or require, more than two acoustic guitars). But "Elvis Presley Blues" eradicates all earlier complaints; swirling their voices together at the end of each verse, Welch and Rawlings forge a sound like a human pedal steel guitar, and the effect is gorgeous. The lugubrious tempo of the album-closing "I Dream A Highway" also sent up a red flag, but though it may be an extraordinary risk for a 15-minute song, it's a calculated one. The song picks up momentum (without speeding up) and develops its own rhythm, emphasizing not the highway but the dream. That's as it should be; the latter is real, the former is not.
There's also what should be an grotesque violation of something that really ought to be a stone-etched rule of songwriting: never reference another song in your own, and for God's sake, don't sing the refrain (as on Rodney Crowell's recent "I Walk The Line (Revisited)," which is noble enough but does itself no favors by not only reminiscing about how great the Johnny Cash song was but getting the Man In Black himself to sing it between verses). The implicit paradox, of course, is that music is, for many of us, such an inextricable part of our lives that to disregard it in song is to cast a blind eye to much of what it's supposed to capture in the first place. So when Welch not only invokes the Steve Miller Band in "My First Lover" but throws in a vocal echo of "Quicksilver Girl" (a brilliant choice for at least three different reasons), it is in the service of acknowledging the power of big (and little) moments to pierce through specific songs and become embedded in them like light developing photographic paper into pictures that only we can see.
And each of those reservations having been dealt with in short order suggests that all complaints, all questions will be addressed and answered in due course. Welch, in fact, doesn't just suggest it, she flat out says so in the opening "Revelator." Maybe that's why she's comfortable and confident enough to deliver "Everything is Free," which I'm fairly positive is the first pro-Napster folk song ever written. In it, Welch questions the motives of anybody who rails against file-sharing and CD burning in what is ultimately an eloquently plainspoken restatement of the age-old saw, "It used to be about the music." Money fades and people die, Welch says. I do this because music lingers on. So why are you so fucking greedy?
And with that celebration of a common, public and shared musical heritage, Welch successfully earns the tag of "folk music" that awaited her by sheer default anyway thanks to Time (The Revelator)'s instrumentation and "Red Clay Halo," wherein the dirt-farmer's daughter frets not that the boys avoid her because she knows Heaven will take her caked in the earth that won't wash off. Playing fast and loose with the American timeline, she conflates (possibly) Abraham Lincoln and the Titanic and (definitely) Elvis and John Henry, which must be another first. Welch also pulls it off, and in the process synthesizes an America without bounded eras, one where normally discrete events, artifacts and time frames overlap and resonate off of one another. It sounds like a pretty nice place.