SONG OF THE DAY

“I Made A Lover’s Prayer” by Gillian Welch (Soul Jour­ney, Acony Records, 2003). Writ­ten by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

WHERE I HEARD IT

On CBS’ detec­tive drama Crim­i­nal Minds, sea­son 5.

BRIEF BIO (a la wikipedia)

- Soul Jour­ney is the fourth stu­dio album by Gillian Welch.

- As with all of her pre­vi­ous releases, it is a col­lab­o­ra­tion with her David Rawlings.

- In their pre­ced­ing work, Time (The Rev­e­la­tor), Welch and Rawl­ings had exper­i­mented with using only acoustic gui­tar and banjo as accom­pa­ni­ment. With Soul Jour­ney, they return to the more diverse and mod­ern instru­men­ta­tion of their early work, employ­ing elec­tric guitar, organ, and drums.

- Their sparse and dark musi­cal style, which com­bines ele­ments of Appalachian music, Bluegrass, and Amer­i­cana, is described by The New Yorker as “at once inno­v­a­tive and obliquely rem­i­nis­cent of past rural forms”.

- Welch and Rawl­ings have released four crit­i­cally acclaimed albums. Their 1996 debut, Revival, and the 2001 release Time (The Rev­e­la­tor), received nom­i­na­tions for the Grammy Award for Best Con­tem­po­rary Folk Album.

- Welch was an asso­ciate pro­ducer and per­formed on two songs of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? sound­track, a plat­inum album that won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2002.

- Gillian Howard Welch was born on Octo­ber 2, 1967 in New York City, and was adopted by Ken and Mitzie Welch, com­edy and music enter­tain­ers. Her bio­log­i­cal mother was a fresh­man in col­lege, and her father was a musi­cian vis­it­ing New York City. Welch has spec­u­lated that her bio­log­i­cal father could have been one of her favorite musi­cians, and she later dis­cov­ered from her adop­tive par­ents that he was a drummer.

- When Welch was three, her adop­tive par­ents moved to Los Ange­les to write music for The Carol Bur­nett Show. They also appeared on The Tonight Show.

- While in high school, a local tele­vi­sion pro­gram fea­tured her as a stu­dent who “excelled at every­thing she did”.

- When a stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Santa Cruz, Welch played bass in a goth band, and drums in a psy­che­delic surf band. In col­lege, a room­mate played an album by the blue­grass band The Stan­ley Broth­ers, and she had an epiphany:

The first song came on and I just stood up and I kind of walked into the other room as if I was in a trac­tor beam and stood there in front of the stereo. It was just as pow­er­ful as the elec­tric stuff, and it was songs I’d grown up singing. All of a sud­den I’d found my music.

- After grad­u­at­ing from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in pho­tog­ra­phy, Welch attended the Berklee Col­lege of Music in Boston, where she majored in songwriting.

- Welch met her music part­ner David Rawl­ings at a suc­cess­ful audi­tion for Berklee’s only coun­try band.

- Upon fin­ish­ing col­lege in 1992, Welch and Rawl­ings moved to Nashville, Tennessee. She recalled, “I looked at my record col­lec­tion and saw that all the music I loved had been made in Nashville—Bill Mon­roe, Dylan, the Stan­ley Brothers, Neil Young—so I moved there. Not ever think­ing I was thirty years too late.“ Rawlings soon followed.

- They never con­sid­ered using a work­ing name, so the duo were sim­ply billed as “Gillian Welch”.

- Allmusic’s Zac John­son wrote that it was “too casual and off-the-cuff”, but called it a “won­der­ful, dusty sum­mer­time front-porch album, full of whiskey drawls and sly smiles, floor­board stomps and screen-door creaks”. Jon Cara­man­ica of Rolling Stone crit­i­cized the slower songs as stag­nant, but com­pli­mented the upbeat songs. Soul Jour­ney also gar­nered sig­nif­i­cant acclaim. John Har­ris of Mojo mag­a­zine described the album as “pretty much per­fect”, and Uncuts Bar­ney Hoskyns favor­ably com­pared it to Bob Dylan and The Band’s The Base­ment Tapes. Will Her­mes of Enter­tain­ment Weekly wrote that Welch has “never sounded deeper, realer [sic], or sexier.”

- Soul Jour­ney peaked at #107 on the Bill­board charts, and reached #3 for Inde­pen­dent Albums.

- Welch has received broad crit­i­cal praise. Geof­frey Himes of The Wash­ing­ton Post described Welch as “one of the most inter­est­ing singer-songwriters of her generation”. In 2003, Tom Kielty of The Boston Globe observed that she was “qui­etly estab­lish­ing one of the most impres­sive cat­a­logs in con­tem­po­rary roots music”, and a 2007 piece in The Guardian by John Har­ris called Welch “one of the decade’s great­est talents”. Critic Robert Hilburn of the Los Ange­les Times wrote, “At every turn, she demon­strates a spark and com­mit­ment that should endear her to any­one from coun­try and folk to pop and rock fans who appre­ci­ate imag­i­na­tion and heart.”

- Welch has recorded songs with a vari­ety of notable artists, includ­ing Ryan Adams, Ani DiFranco, Emmy­lou Har­ris, Jay Far­rar, Ali­son Krauss, Old Crow Med­i­cine Show, Bright Eyes, Robyn Hitchcock, Steve Earle, Ralph Stanley, Solomon Burke and Mark Knopfler.

VIDEO OF THE DAY