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.
I dropped by Powell’s City of Books last night to say hello to Daniel Levitin and hear him talk about his new book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine. I interviewed him in Tape Op #74 way back in 2009. There’s a lot of...
In issue 32 we had a short review of Linda Smith's current CD. Even though we meant to get an interview with Linda in the mag at some point, for some reason it never quite happened. Jump to 2011 and Linda has assembled a site full of MP3's of her...
Singer, songwriter, and stringed instrument master, Sarah Jarosz, has just released a deluxe edition version of her criitically-acclaimed album, Polaroid Lovers. This edition features two new songs, "Wildflowers in the Sky" and "Just Like...
I interviewed David J in 2015, as I had long been a fan of his bands Bauhaus and Love & Rockets, and had been buying his solo albums since his first works in the '80s. We ended up working on some music with Barton Carroll at my studio a year or...
I've received a few pretty odd emails recently. I know times are tough, unemployment sucks, but really, expecting any sort of "bailout" from the music biz has got to be the most delusional crap I've come across. Making a living in music requires hard...
Thanks for this guest post by John Morand
I wasn’t surprised when I heard that Daniel Johnston had died. It was 9-11 and for me, there would always be a connection between Daniel and 9-11. In the days after the attack, when...
We interviewed Jim Keller of Sondhus in issue #142. Sondhus (SAHN - duss) is an architectural acoustics design and build firm specializing in recording studios. They have designed and built studios for the likes of Depeche Mode, Apple, Heba Kadry,...
Larry interviewed Jack White back in Tape Op #82, and we went inside his Third Man Records pressing plant in issue #127.
White just released his sixth solo album, No Name. It is a great listen filled with whisps of Zeppelin, swamp blues, Detroit...
Geoff Stanfield and Andy Hong add an update to the original Meris Mercury7 Reverb review by Adam Kagan.
GS: I am a fan of the Meris line of gear. They are a small shop who builds their high-quality modules in Los Angeles. I have reviewed the Meris...