Gillian Welch will perform at the Tivoli Theatre on Friday, Dec. 30. The doors will open at 7 p.m. and the show starts at 8 p.m.
Tickets are $35 and $29 plus applicable fees and are available at the Tivoli Theatre Box Office, tivolichattanooga.com or by phone at 800.745-3000.
Review for Gillian Welch:
Before we go any further, before we address anything, I'd like you to forget. Maybe forget what Gillian Welch shows you've seen, the floorboards all sparking from the weight of these two souls, Gill and Dave, and their four collective cowboy-booted soles; maybe forget when you first heard "Orphan Girl," that song that seemed to exist outside of time and caused everyone who heard it to become the itinerant, the loner, the longing; maybe forget the years that have passed when last a new Gillian Welch record graced the hi-fi's of the music-listening world -- forget the pop stars risen and erased in those years, the administrations and regimes born and gone in those years -- forget, indeed, that there are eight of them, eight years, since Soul Journey arrived into the world.
The Harrow & The Harvest, Gill and Dave's new record, is both a product of and is unrelated to those years in-between. Best to forget that. What it is, indisputably, is the product of two people who have become so entwined in one another that the songs and the singing and the playing on this record seems to exude from a single voice. This is the sound of two people in a room, playing to one another, with one another. This is the sound of the room in which the two people are playing. This is the sound of two voices, locked in unison, locked in harmony. The sound of two people playing live, with no overdubs, and very few takes. Two people making music together as if they were one soul combined.
Now back up.This is what we know: Gill and Dave met at Berklee College of Music; Gillian was studying songwriting, while Dave studied guitar; they met at an audition for a country band. Together, they moved to Nashville where most of their work together has been produced. Since then they have influenced and inspired new generations of country and folk singers, songwriters and players. They have earned the slavish admiration of many of the most lauded and loved voices of the Americana milieu now living -- and some who have since deceased (rest their souls). They've had their songs recorded by the likes of Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, and Solomon Burke. Gill and Dave's body of work is deeply rooted in the world it has sought to portray in song: the American South.
"Yes, Tennessee figures rather prominently in the new songs," says Gillian. The record, however, has little of the sweet sunny south; in fact, there's a real dark pallor to the thing -- and the language in the songs seems to recall the shady groves of Tennessee far more than anything that the duet has done in recent memory. "The truth is, we absented ourselves from Nashville for a while, to escape the weight of home and studio and record label. But I think our thoughts turned back there with a newness and clarity I hadn't felt since I moved there almost 20 years ago."