For Gillian Welch, putting Soul Journey on vinyl wasn’t just a format update—it was a full-on reclamation project. “Fifteen years,” she said, practically sighing at the math. “We started working towards putting out all of our records as records about ten years ago. This is just how long it took.” The holdup wasn’t disinterest; it was obsession. Welch and David Rawlings literally built a custom lathe system with mastering engineer Steven Marcusson. “I got so tired of people asking why we didn’t have vinyl that I’d just say, ‘Because we’re building a lathe,’” she said. Which turned out not to be a joke.
The payoff, she insists, was worth it. “Soul Journey needed a little bit of coalescing,” she explained, comparing it to food that’s better the next day after sitting in the fridge. “That’s what the vinyl did—it put everything in a more sonically beautiful world.” Listening back now, she hears something she didn’t fully appreciate at the time: “It’s probably our most punk record. Outsider. Brash. We didn’t give a flying…” She trailed off, smiling at the memory of a younger self unbothered by marketability. “Now, everybody thinks about marketing. Everything’s Instagram. Soul Journey was blammo, no marketing. We didn’t care.”
And yet, from that lack of calculation came her most enduring song. “Miss Ohio” wasn’t even supposed to be a single. Welch shrugged it off as a nursery rhyme chorus, jotted it down, and promptly forgot it. It was Rawlings who rescued it from the wastebasket. “A couple days later he asked, ‘What about that catchy song?’ I didn’t even know what he was talking about. I’d totally forgotten.” So goes the origin story of what became a modern folk standard—Welch almost abandoned it out of sheer indifference.
Soul Journey also marked her first time reshaping traditional material. Her version of “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor” swapped out an old line about sneaking upstairs to cheat for something closer to her own experience: sleeping on friends’ hardwood when stranded. “I’ve done that plenty of times,” she said. “It modernized it in my head. People still crash on floors.”
If Soul Journey was her punk record, then Hell Among the Yearlings—which quietly turned 20—was her grunge record. Not in sound, but in vibe. The follow-up to her Grammy-nominated debut was supposed to be cut as a trio with the late Roy Huskey Jr. on upright bass. His death left Welch and Rawlings stripped back to a duo. “We weren’t quite ready to make that record,” she admitted. “People warn you—keep writing after your first record because you’ll get out on the road, then they’ll say, ‘Okay, make your second record,’ and you won’t have anything. That kind of happened to us.” They cut it at the same LA studio where Nirvana made Nevermind, which, she swears, still carried a darkness. “There were some weird vibes in that place.”
Two decades later, Welch is still stubbornly following instinct, whether it’s writing every day until she drifts into a “weird headspace,” or playing with Rawlings as a stripped-down duet because it feels fresh again. Even their bigger, shinier moments—like “Cumberland Gap,” which turned into one of her most streamed tracks—still carry the same grit. “Ken Scott pushed us to do a little more in the studio than we normally would,” she admitted, “and I’m glad he did.”
In the end, it’s the same Gillian Welch ethos as ever: no marketing schemes, no committee-designed singles, no bending for trends. Just the songs—sometimes discovered, sometimes forgotten, always stubbornly hers.
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