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.
Some Maybe Not-So-Obvious Items Every Studio Needs
In the past we've run a few columns about items every studio should have, like Sharpie pens and masking tape, but here I decided to look around me and think about all the items that aren't...
Eddie Ashworth dropped me a line about the work he and many other scholars are doing with the Art of Record Production folks. Be sure to read The Journal for the Art of Record Production online. It's densely full of articles, interviews, reviews...
We interviewed John Cale in issue #156 around the time of his previous release, Mercy. He has just released POPtical Illusion, a collection of synth and keyboard heavy tunes that carry a heavy, and at times angry message about the state of the...
head-fi: n, audiophile-grade headphone systems.portable: adj, able to be easily carried.
The record industry is about twenty-five years into a massive devaluation of its products. This devaluation is not due to some invisible calculus the way, say,...
So I just noticed an email in my inbox from a PR person with the headline: "XXXXX MICS FEATURED IN THE BEATLES?: ROCK BAND? VIDEO GAME". What's next? "Shure SM57 seen briefly in a movie"? "Rob Thomas sings into wrong side of a mic in a video"? Oh...
Years ago John Fischbach, a well-established and respected producer/engineer, came to my studio to record an album that our mutual friend, Luther Russell, was producing. [See Tape Op #21.] In those days my studio, Jackpot! Recording, was a diamond...
The future of a world-class recording studio that has hosted recording sessions by David Gray, Anthrax, Ginuwine, Aaliyah, Bad Religion, Missy Elliott, Joe Bonnamassa, producers including Timbaland and Tom Dowd, Pulitzer Prize winning composer Steven...
Okay, I'll admit I vote for the Grammies. Yup. Why? Besides the sometimes odd spectacle of the Grammy Awards, NARAS does some cool stuff in the music community (like the Seattle Studio Summit), MusiCares and the Producers and Engineers Wing. So I do...