Acclaimed songwriter and guitarist David Rawlings will release his freshly pressed third album, Poor David’s Almanack, on August 11th via Acony Records. For Poor David’s Almanack, Rawlings leaves the Dave Rawlings Machine moniker behind and serves up a wry mixture of acoustic and electric music rich in ageless American vernacular. The album of ten new songs was crafted by studio wizards Ken Scott (Beatles, David Bowie) and Matt Andrews on analog tape during a week of sessions at legendary Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, Tennessee. Rawlings and longtime compatriot Gillian Welch joined together with Willie Watson, Paul Kowert, Brittany Haas, Ketch Secor, and Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith of Dawes to produce an album for all seasons.

The touring iteration of Rawlings’ band, the all-star Dave Rawlings Machine, will embark on the first leg of a national tour this August to support Poor David’s Almanack, as well as perform favorites from the first two Dave Rawlings Machine records, A Friend of A Friend and Nashville Obsolete. Full list of dates below and you can find more info here.

This release marks the 8th studio collaboration between Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Their creative partnership spans over two decades and includes the GRAMMY-nominated The Harrow and the Harvest (2011), the much lauded and latest Rawlings release, Nashville Obsolete, which landed on numerous 2015 year-end best‐of lists, and the 2001 GRAMMY-nominated masterpiece Time (The Revelator). All releases are available on Acony Records, the independent label they founded in 2001. In recognition of their remarkable career, Welch and Rawlings were honored with the Americana Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting in 2015 and the Berklee American Masters Award in 2016.

David RawlingsPoor David’s Almanack Track List
01 Midnight Train
02 Money Is The Meat In The Coconut
03 Cumberland Gap
04 Airplane
05 Lindsey Button
06 Come On Over My House
07 Guitar Man
08 Yup
09 Good God A Woman
10 Put ‘Em Up Solid

Preorder the album here.

Dave Rawlings Machine Tour Dates – Tickets at http://www.davidrawlingsmusic.com/tour/
August 16 /// Louisville, KY /// WL Lyons Brown Theatre
August 17 /// St. Louis, MO /// Sheldon Concert Hall
August 18 /// Kansas City, MO /// Folly Theater
August 20 /// Lyons, CO /// Rocky Mountain Folks Festival
August 23 /// Minneapolis, MN /// Pantages Theatre
August 24 /// Madison, WI /// The Capitol Theater
August 25 /// Chicago, IL /// Thalia Hall
August 26 /// Bloomington, IN /// The Bluebird

More dates to be announced soon.

www.davidrawlingsmusic.com

 

June is Indie Month! We are very proud to have received 3 Libera Awards nominations from our peers in the Independent Music community. Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg is up for BEST ALBUM (Country/Americana/Folk). We are also nominated for BEST RECORD LABEL, and BEST SYNCH USAGE. The Awards are this week in NYC. Congratulations to all the other independent artists and labels who have been recognized this year. Here’s a clip below of our nom for synch usage, Gillian and David’s “I’m Not Afraid to Die,” from 1998’s Hell Among the Yearlings, featured in the move Hell or High Water, which Gillian posted on her new official instagram account this week.


Apple Music is also featuring Libera Award nominees on their site this month. Check out applemusic.com/indiemonth to see Editor’s picks and new releases, including Gillian’s latest release, Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg.

Dear Friends,

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ music has never been available on vinyl, but we will be remedying this starting with the multi-Grammy nominated album The Harrow & The Harvest.
Simultaneously, Gillian and David will be performing the album LIVE in its entirety for the first time ever in a few selected cities. Please come help us celebrate this long awaited event. Naturally, we will have phonograph records available for purchase at all the shows!

THE HARROW & THE HARVEST IN CONCERT
* playing the album in its entirety

Sun 7/30 – Charlottesville, VA @ Sprint Pavilion
Mon 7/31 – Washington, DC @ Kennedy Center
Wed 8/2 – New York, NY @ Beacon Theatre
Fri 8/4 – Charlotte, NC @ Knight Theater
Sat 8/5 – Atlanta, GA @ Atlanta Symphony Hall
Mon 8/7 – Nashville, TN @ Ryman Auditorium

P.S. Many are asking if THE HARROW & THE HARVEST IN CONCERT tour will make it to the west coast. We are pleased to say that an official announcement will be coming soon!

Dear Friends,

Due to the rapid pace of orders, we believe the first pressing of The Harrow & The Harvest WILL SELL OUT UPON RELEASE. Therefore, to ensure your copy, we strongly encourage you to preorder the record now. Our favorite retailers will of course have a limited number on hand if you prefer the satisfaction of walking in and grabbing it off the shelf, just don’t wait too long. Release day is July 28, 2017.


    Acony    


    Amazon    

And for our friends abroad, preorders are now available without import fees:


    Amazon UK    


    Canada    


    Australia    

Gillian Welch’s long-awaited first record pressing will be 2011’s The Harrow & The Harvest, coming out Acony Records on July 28, 2017. You can preorder the vinyl right now from gillianwelch.com or amazon.com.

“We have been working and waiting 20 years to bring you our music on phonograph record. It took a while, because we wanted to do it the right way, the absolute best way humanly possible, and I believe that’s what we’ve done. No sonic stone was left unturned, no nuance let fall by the wayside. There is honestly nothing else I can imagine hoping to hear out of the original tapes. It is all there in the groove. As people whose lives were changed by the sound of music coming off turntables, we humbly invite you to include us in your record collection.” – Gillian Welch

To celebrate this long-awaited release, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings will be performing The Harrow & The Harvest in its entirety this summer in Charlottesville, Washington, D.C., New York City, Charlotte, Atlanta, and Nashville. They will also be touring late August as the Dave Rawlings Machine, playing several shows on their way to and from to the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival in Colorado. See below for all upcoming tour details & more.

Gillian Welch US Tour Dates

Sun 7/30 – Charlottesville, VA @ Sprint Pavilion
Mon 7/31 – Washington, DC @ Kennedy Center
Wed 8/2 – New York, NY @ Beacon Theatre
Fri 8/4 – Charlotte, NC @ Knigt Theater
Sat 8/5 – Atlanta, GA @ Atlanta Symphony Hall
Mon 8/7 – Nashville, TN @ Ryman Auditorium
*all shows on sale Friday, May 12th

Dave Rawlings Machine US Tour Dates

Wed 8/16 – Louisville, KY @ Brown Theatre
Thu 8/17 – St. Louis, MO @ The Sheldon Concert Hall
Fri 8/18 – Kansas City, MO @ Folly Theater
Sun 8/20 – Lyons, CO @ Rocky Mountain Folks Fest
Wed 8/23 – Minneapolis, MN @ Pantages Theatre
Thu 8/24 – Madison, WI @ Capitol Theater
Fri 8/25 – Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall
Sat 8/26 – Bloomington, IN @ The Bluebird
*all shows on sale Friday, May 12th

Brand New “Dark Turn of Mind” Music Video

Click here to watch the world premiere of the new video for “Dark Turn of Mind” from The Harrow & The Harvest.

The Johnny Cash-inspired track from Boots No. 1 gets a stop-motion animation treatment.

A new music video for “Dry Town (Demo)” from Boots No 1: The Official Revival Bootleg premiered this morning on NPR. Click here to watch the delightfully animated film using good old fashioned stop motion, a few plastic dolls and some anthropomorphized shot glasses, created by artist Rachel Blumberg.

“‘Dry Town’ came from a live experience I had on a road trip when I was just out of college,” Welch tells NPR Music in an email. “David and I wrote the song shortly after moving to Nashville, after a show where we opened for Johnny Cash. We were so inspired to meet Johnny and see him in the flesh that we wanted to capture some of that narrative swagger and humor in a song of our own. Since the story is front and center, it seemed like a great chance to bring the song to life with stop motion animation.”

Welch said she gave the toy ’71 Buick featured prominently in the video to animator Rachel Blumberg (a former drummer for The Decemberist, Bright Eyes & M Ward). It soon became the foundation for the video’s whole aesthetic.

“Gillian had seen [the stop motion sketch comedy] Robot Chicken recently and thusly had the idea in her head of using action figures to tell the story in the song,” says Blumberg. “There were a lot of moments when I was inspired by the rhythm of a line, from the phrasing and melody, about how the characters should move, or what little moment was happening. Besides the music, the lyrics have a great visual quality and rhythm and it made sense to interpret things in a very literal way, which I think adds to the humor of the piece.”

“Dry Town (Demo)” is from Gillian Welch’s Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg, available now at gillianwelch.com, iTunes, Amazon.com & many more.

 


New Items in Official Merch Store

SPECIAL POSTER SALE

 

It’s no secret that we love posters here at Acony, especially ones by our hometown heroes Hatch Show Print! From now until February 14th, we are offering 20% of All Posters at the Acony Records Online Store. Just enter the promo code “WELOVEHATCH” at checkout and any posters in your cart will get the exclusive discount. We have added to our stock any remaining Ryman posters we have left from the last couple of years, as well as the Fillmore poster from last year’s Dave Rawlings Machine tour made exclusively for that show, and a whole bunch of new t-shirts! Click here to check out the new swag.

Gillian Welch’s groundbreaking album Revival was released twenty years ago. To commemorate the anniversary, Welch’s own Acony Records released Boots No 1: The Official Revival Bootleg on November 25th. Personally curated and produced by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, they worked alongside archivist Glen Chausse to mine selections from their extensive vault of analog tape recordings. The two-disc set features 8 previously unreleased songs, and include 21 outtakes, alternate versions, and demos from the making of the album such as the earliest home demo of “Orphan Girl,” which was recorded on a four track, and the rarity “Georgia Road,” a song that was only performed live once. The demo “Dry Town” was written the week after Welch and Rawlings opened for Johnny Cash and premiered last month on SiriusXM’s Outlaw Country channel and is highlighted on NPR Music. The album is available on iTunes, Amazon, Gillianwelch.com and more.

Order Boots No. 1:




TRACK LIST:

Disc One
1. Orphan Girl (Alternate Version)
2. Annabelle (Alternate Version)
3. Pass You By (Alternate Version)
4. Go On Downtown (Revival Outtake)
5. Red Clay Halo (Revival Outtake)
6. By The Mark (Alternate Mix)
7. Paper Wings (Demo)
8. Georgia Road (Revival Outtake)
9. Tear My Stillhouse Down (Home Demo)
10. Only One and Only (Alternate Version)

Disc Two
1. Orphan Girl (Home Demo)
2. I Don’t Want to Go Downtown (Revival Outtake)
3. 455 Rocket (Revival Outtake)
4. Barroom Girls (Live Radio)
5. Wichita (Revival Outtake)
6. One More Dollar (Alternate Version)
7. Dry Town (Demo)
8. Paper Wings (Alternate Mix)
9. Riverboat Song (Revival Outtake)
10. Old Time Religion (Revival Outtake)
11. Acony Bell (Demo)

photo by John Patrick Salisbury

Of the album, Gillian says, “I’m happy that the songs hold up. That’s probably the thing I’m most proud of. There is that interesting moment in any writer’s first batch of songs or any writer’s first novel or anything, a filmmaker’s first movie that always seems to have something that is different from what comes after. Something happens in that first push. Maybe because you’re usually up against more resistance. But there is a purity or a diamond hardness to the first batch that doesn’t seem to happen again. And so Revival has that when I look at it. Maybe it’s lack of ego. You know, there really was no me. You know, the artist Gillian Welch didn’t really exist. And then after that, I did.”

The New Yorker: Twenty Years Of Listening to Gillian Welch

By Jedediah Purdy, September 9, 2016

Gillian Welch, the Los Angeles-raised musician, whose lyrics and voice conjure Appalachian hollows, Dust Bowl highways, and Nashville morphine dens, released her first album, Revival, twenty years ago. Several of the songs sounded as if they might have been written a hundred years earlier. Welch’s alto is rich and tarnished, with a roughness that hints at a tired or heat-baked throat. In “By the Mark,” she promised, “By the sign that shines / Upon His precious skin / I will know my savior / When I come to Him / By the mark where the nails have been.” Welch wrote from the perspective of the type of people the folklorist Alan Lomax had sought out in the nineteen-thirties and forties—poor, usually either exploited or forgotten—whom Lomax and other revivalists saw as carrying organic traditions of sound, feeling, and imagination. In “Annabelle,” a poor sharecropper whose young daughter has died reflects, “Till we’ve all / Gone to Jesus / We can only / Wonder why.” Other songs on Revival were first-person laments, confessions, or boasts from moonshiners, migrant fruit pickers, and bootleggers.

Read full article >>

Paste Magazine: Catching Up With Gillian Welch

By Molly Morgan, September 15, 2016

Gillian Welch’s friends thought she had become the victim of some kind of scam when she told them she was going to play a thousand-person audience festival at Cloverleaf Farm outside of Athens, Ga. They thought it was too good to be true. Wildwood Revival, taking place over Aug. 25-27, placed Welch and partner David Rawlings in an open-air barn, playing on Saturday night after a string of far lesser-known acts. That is, far lesser-known in comparison to Welch, who by the way, just landed two spots in our recent list of the 50 Best Alt-Country Albums of All Time, with her debut Revival in the number three spot. It was rare that a band or artist didn’t mention how grateful they were to be on a festival bill with Welch from the stage over the weekend.

Read full interview >>

photo by Michael Weintrob

DAVE RAWLINGS MACHINE FEATURED IN SEASON PREMIER OF BLUEGRASS UNDERGROUND

For those not able to make it to the Dave Rawlings Machine’s extra-special performance at Cumberland Caverns in TN this spring, Dave’s set will be broadcast in the very first episode of the Emmy Award-winning Bluegrass Underground, starting up again this week on PBS. Click here to check your local PBS listings and click below to watch a clip of “The Last Pharaoh” from the Machine’s episode, which airs this week.

GOING TO CALIFORNIA

As the Machine heads up the West Coast this fall, we’ve added an essential stop at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco on Saturday, October 1st. See below for what will likely be your last chance to catch this Machine this year!

2016 Dave Rawlings Machine – US Tour Dates
Thu – 9/29/16 – Santa Cruz, CA @ Rio Theatre
Fri – 9/30/16 – San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore
Sat – 10/1/16 – San Francisco, CA @ Hardly Strictly Bluegrass
Mon – 10/3/16 – Sacramento, CA @ Crest Theatre
Tue – 10/4/16 – Chico, CA @ CSU Chico
Thu – 10/6/16 – Redding, CA @ Cascade Theatre
Fri – 10/7/16 – Arcata, CA @ The John Van Duzer Theatre
Sat – 10/8/16 – Grants Pass, OR @ Rogue Theatre

Visit daverawlingsmachine.com for all news and tour updates.

gillralphcrop

We have lost another pillar of the music world… Ralph Stanley passed away yesterday. He is the reason I do what I do. The day he asked me to sing with him I felt I had made it. Now he is gone. Rest in peace. Our thoughts and prayers are with Jimmie and the rest of the family.
Gillian Welch
Nashville, Tenn.