It's not surprising Harrow is dark with wry twists because these new songs have been a long time coming. She has released records regularly since her 1996 debut Revival, including breakthrough Time (The Revelator) in 2001, but it's been eight years since her last album, Soul Journey. It got to the point, ponders Welch, where she didn't know if she and Rawlings had any songs left in them.
Many of her fans - and there are many in New Zealand, judging by the steady sales of Harrow since its release four weeks ago - would have been thinking the same thing.
But much like the whiskey she quite often sings about, good things take time.
"It's somewhat rare for people to take that longer break and then ever make a record again," she says bluntly. "A lot of the time that much time off means you're done. And I had to consider it, because we were trying most of that time and not succeeding to write songs that we liked. So when you work for that long and don't get anywhere, you have to at some point consider stopping."
However, like many of the seemingly down-and-out yet hearty characters in the songs on the new album, they stuck at it. "Both David and I realised that basically there was no way we were going to stop doing this."
The Harrow and the Harvest deals with some heavy stuff, from songs littered with images of gatling guns and silver daggers, through to haunting, almost random, lines like "everybody's buying little baby clothes" on The Way It Goes.
"It's dealing with what happens when time passes and things don't go as you thought they would, or wanted them to, and the cataclysmic affect this has on human relationships, hopes, dreams, and all kinds of things," she says.
"But no matter what kind of trouble the people in the songs are going through, there is always this stoicism, a gritty sense of optimism, and always the sense that they're going to make it through. It just might be a bit rough. And clearly that's all coming from me ... I had no desire to take an eight-year break. That's not what I wanted to do. That's just what happened."
Another inspiration, and something that got Welch and Rawlings cracking on new songs, was doing road trips and writing as they went.
In the past they wrote at home in Nashville, but the pair started to feel like a break from the country music capital of America. "Nashville, Tennessee, and the southern Appalachian region is really the cradle of our work. It's where we feel at home, and it's where we've lived, coming up 20 years," she says. "But if I can liken it to a long-term relationship, it had kind of got a little stale. It's common among writers to become desensitised, or wear out where they live. And Nashville had gone a bit flat for us."
So they hit the road and it shows on the album as they wend and wind their way through Tennessee, "down along the Dixie line", and mosey on through Scarlet Town ("You slept on a feather bed, and I slept on the floor").
"This travelling worked like a charm - all you have to do is leave a place that you know too well and suddenly you can see it again. It was a reacquainting and return to our original passion for the American South, which had drifted a bit."
"The songs that we ultimately like are a bit of a magic trick. They walk a line between country and rock, and bluegrass, folk, and modern and traditional.
"It's a bit of a balancing act that all the songs that we keep liking and keep playing over the years have a bit of neither now or then, neither here nor there, about them."
Put simply, they are timeless and unique.
"And," she says, "it's just really good to be out here playing these new songs."
There are plans to return to New Zealand, so watch this space.
Lowdown
Who: Gillian Welch
What: Dark and wry country folk and bluegrass out of Nashville, Tennessee
New album: The Harrow & the Harvest, out now
Past albums: Revival (1996); Hell Among the Yearlings (1998); Time (The Revelator) (2001); Soul Journey (2003)
- TimeOut
