Tribute albums frequently betray their subject, but not this homage to Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears, the country giant’s 1964 salute to Native Americans. A concept album about a discomfiting cause – the US’s treatment of its indigenous people – Tears was a radical statement resisted, to Cash’s fury, by the Nashville establishment. For its 50th anniversary, producer Joe Henry gathers a stellar house band that takes turns to lead. Gillian Welch delivers an entrancing As Long As the Grass Shall Grow; Emmylou does likewise with Apache Tears. Steve Earle drawls: “I ain’t no fan of Custer” and instrumentals evoke North America’s haunted plains. Very fine.
Nashville Obsolete is the second solo outing for ace guitarist and producer David Rawlings, who for nearly two decades has shared the load with creative partner Gillian Welch to become one of folk and country music's most celebrated duos. Like 2009's Friend of a Friend, this seven-song mini-album is billed under the Dave Rawlings Machine banner and features a small ensemble that sees Rawlings and Welch swapping roles in what has become their familiar format. His reedy tenor voice that usually melts so effortlessly with Welch's takes the lead here on a set of melancholic songs that channel tones of Bob Dylan and Neil Young through the Dust Bowl filter that has become his bailiwick.
As Whiskeytown finally ground to a halt in the wake of an astonishing number of personal changes following Faithless Street (coupled with record company problems that kept their final album, Pneumonia, from reaching stores until two years after it was recorded), Ryan Adams ducked into a Nashville studio for two weeks of sessions with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. While arch traditionalists Welch and Rawlings would hardly seem like a likely match for alt-country's bad boy, the collaboration brought out the best in Adams; Heartbreaker is loose, open, and heartfelt in a way Whiskeytown's admittedly fine albums never were, and makes as strong a case for Adams' gifts as anything his band ever released…
Time (The Revelator) is the third full-length album by Gillian Welch. All songs were written by Welch together with David Rawlings and were recorded in Nashville, Tennessee. "I Want To Sing That Rock and Roll" was recorded live at the Ryman Auditorium as part of the sessions for the concert film, Down from the Mountain, all the rest of the tracks were recorded at RCA Studio B, Nashville, Tennessee.
Film composer Carter Burwell, who scored Joel and Ethan Coen’s Netflix release, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, is the next guest on The Hollywood Reporter's Behind the Screen podcast series.
Behind the Screen, hosted by THR tech editor Carolyn Giardina, features interviews with cinematographers, editors, composers, production designers and other creative talent behind the making of motion pictures.
Burwell has composed the music for more than 80 feature films, including 17 with the Coen brothers such as Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men and True Grit. He’s also a two-time Oscar nominee for Carol and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. …
Sometime after the release of 2003's sparse and slightly chilly Luxor, Robyn Hitchcock attended his first Gillian Welch show. Impressed by the duo's rootsy adherence to the organic – two guitars, two voices – he approached the longtime fans – Hitchcock unknowingly signed David Rawlings' guitar at a Boston in-store in 1989 – and exchanged digits. The unlikely partnership came to fruition at Nashville's Woodland Studios a few months later, and in just six days the lovely, intimate, and typically eccentric Spooked was born. Produced by Rawlings and culled from hours of off-the-cuff originals, Dylan songs, and general weirdness, Spooked harks back to his mercurial I Often Dream of Trains period.