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| Gillian Welch |
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"Everything's not supposed to sound the same, you want it to reflect change and growth."
-Gillian Welch
| Date of Birth: October 1967 |
| Birthplace: Manhattan |
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| Her debut album Revival received gushing praise, as did her fourth and latest one, Soul Journey. Gillian has opened for Norah Jones, worked with Ani DiFranco, and contributed to the award-winning soundtrack for the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in which she also lent her voice to one of the seductive sirens. |
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| She's country. She's bluegrass. She's folk and punk. She's all of them and none of them. Welch's sweet hillbilly sound is at once haunting and soothing; an amalgamation of different styles that results in a very unique brand of music, which she dubs "American primitive." |
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Born in October 1967 in Manhattan, Gillian moved to Los Angeles with her folks and older sister when she was 4. As her parents were both musicians, Gillian grew up in a house filled with instruments, and often found herself in a musical circle with her family. By the age of 7, she could already play the guitar.
Her parents loved jazz music, especially standards by Irvin Berlin and Rodgers and Hart. Gillian's first records were by James Taylor and the Beatles. By the end of high school, she was incorporating R.E.M. and Velvet Underground's style into her latent compositions.
But it was at the University of California at Santa Cruz that Welch discovered bluegrass music. The two-part harmonies, the fiddles, the sweet acoustic home sound: it all clicked for her. "It suited my playing and singing," she once remarked. She began to take in as much as she could, the legendary Stanley Brothers being her guiding light.
She graduated from college in the late '80s and joined a Bay Area band. But her hunger for music went unsatiated. She moved to Boston and enrolled at the Berklee College of Music. Playing bluegrass in the local clubs, she drew much inspiration from The Pixies and The Breeders.
In Boston she met guitarist David Rawlings at an audition for a country band. He would become her longtime musical partner, both in performance and in composition. Finding each other out of their elements, they moved to Nashville in 1992, and began building a career.
Playing a gig in Nashville, she met T-Bone Burnett, a former member of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review, and producer to such heavyweights as Los Lobos, Sam Phillips, Counting Crows, and Elvis Costello. He offered Welch his services and she signed a deal with Almo Irving Music. In 1996, she released Revival, which featured an impressive list of Nashville music celebrities, was a genuinely new treatment of bluegrass within a folksy backdrop. There was even a hint of Pixies-esque punk in the distorted "Pass You By." Revival was nominated for a Grammy award for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 1997.
Her name was hot. Country legends like Emmylou Harris were coveting her songs, and folk immortal Joan Baez proclaimed herself a fan. Being a veritable mine of music, she put out her second album, Hell Among the Yearlings, two years later. |
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© Rick Diamond
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