Song of the Day
Gillian Welch relaxing after a 2005 Grand Ol' Opry appearance.
Caleb Meyer- Gillian Welch w/ David Rawlings When you hear the sound and fury of Gillian Welch's 2004 performance of
Caleb Meyer, you have to wonder why she hasn't been in the recording studio in the past six years. The video is courtesy of the venerable BBC4 and was filmed at St. Luke's a beautiful London church, converted into an accoustically perfect small concert performance venue.
Caleb Meyer was the lead tune on Gillian's second album,
Hell Among the Yearlings which was released in 1998. Ms. Welch and her songwriting and performing partner, David Rawlings, were among the earliest notable artists of the 90s neo-traditionalist music revival. Between 1996 and 2003 Ms. Welch made four dazzling albums of starkly beautiful rootsy country music. She's been promising to be back in the studio in for around three years now. I hope she makes good on the promise by sometime next year. She's been gone too long.
To listen to Gillian's music you'd swear she was an indigenous musician from some remote Appalachian mining town in West Virginia. So I was suprised to find out that Gillian grew up in an upper middle class area of Los Angeles and her parents were both comedy writers for the Carol Burnett Show.
Gillian has talked about her the influence punk and proto-punk music on her own post modernist approach to country music:
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“I feel a kinship with the Velvet Underground and the Pixies, though it might not hit you over the head. Let’s say you’re listening to a rock band and they have this whole wall of sound going on, and it’s completely unhinged and it sounds crazy. If you pulled four notes out of that whole mess and played them on acoustic guitars, that’s what Dave and I do. We’re highly selective deconstructionists.
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The neo-traditional revivalist movement peaked with the unanticipated runaway success of the soundtrack to
Oh Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. Since 2000, it's been pretty much downhill for the neo trads: John Hartford has died, Alison Krauss won a Grammy for a collaborative album with an ex-Led Zeppelin member, Ryan Adams has yet to find his musical compass and Gillian Welch has been silent since 2003.
A lot of good roots music has come and gone over the past decade but dance music, hip hop, Nashville country pop still dominate the charts. Real authentic roots music is still an underground phenomena heard on boutique indie labels only. And worse... the same six global infotainment corporations control 85% of the retail music market while feeding us a steady diet of the same old uninspired mainstream garbage.
In this stunning performance of
Caleb Meyer you can pick up on the punk influence by the force of simplicity, the melodic dissonance and the unconventional
anti-guitar approach of both Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Notice how Rawlings uses a capo way down on the fifth fret of his guitar to make it sound like a mandolin.