Woodland is the name of Gillian Welch and David Rawling’s studio in Nashville, and it’s also the name of their new album. On Woodland, the duo continue to show their deep connection as collaborators. The album has a wide open sound that features their seemlessly blended and intimately recorded vocals, and the light touch of a backing band that includes drums, bass, pedal steel, banjo, and airy strings on tunes like "What We Had" and "Hashtag". "Lawman" and "The Bells and the Birds" have a lovely somberness, and the album as a whole has a "live off the floor" feeling to it that we hear less and less of these days. Woodland will stay in our "recently played" column for the forseeable future.
We interviewed Gillian and Dave back in 2001 for Tape Op #85.
Tape Op is a bi-monthly magazine devoted to the art of record making.
Fire Extinguishers in the Studio - [Note to our EU readers. I don't know if the U.S. letter conventions apply in your locale, but the fundamental suggestions in this post are universal.]
It’s a really smart idea to have a couple of fire...
Video Release: James Supercave "Burn"
What follows may be one of the best answers to the "So, how'd you guys meet?" question we have ever heard. Producer, engineer, and oft-recorded bassist (Black Keys, Ryan Adams, Norah Jones) Gus Seyffert was...
Musow Danse by Les Amazones d'Afrique is out now and was produced by Garrett Jacknife Lee. Read his interview from Tape Op #149. This pan-country, multilingual supergroup of amazing African women is powerful and so important. Their previous two...
I politely asked Youtube to remove a song by my old band that someone had posted without permission. They took it down but then apologized "sorry about that" and ran my business name as if "blaming me" for removing content. Really? Wow. Pretty...
I’m normally not that into live albums, but Nils Frahm is not a normal musician. I saw him play live in 2018 when I interviewed him for Tape Op, and it was hard to believe that he was the only musician on stage. Blending electronic elements...
Yup, I sit at my computer all day editing articles, writing stuff for the mag and answering the ridiculous amount of emails that always seep in over the course of a day.
illus by Eva Kihl
I'm about to write something that at first will seem like another gray-beard waxing nostalgic for a by-gone analog era. But, stick with me, because I think the tables are turning to where going analog might be as forward-thinking as it gets.
Let's...
Garret Haines wrote a thorough review of this UAD plug-in in Tape Op #106. You should read it. Here are a few of Geoff Stanfield’s thoughts on a plug-in that he has come to use and love, not only for its sonic closeness to the original, but...