Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch came up with the title for their newest album with the Dave Rawlings Machine, Nashville Obsolete, when the two discussed the idea of running a fictitious business in their basement studio. “We thought, oh, we should have a little store that sells things nobody needs anymore, VHS tapes and cassette tapes and typewriter ribbon, ordered by catalog only,” he said. “And we’d have a slogan: If you don’t need it, we’ve got it.”
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek though the title is — it’s also Rawlings’s way of poking fun at the pair’s two-decade-long career, long enough to qualify for rock obsolescence — Nashville Obsolete is a fitting title for a band that plays in a bygone style, writing of an America that time has obscured. The new album is a paean to a kind of country that modernity is quickly transforming. “Nashville is a vastly different place than it was six or seven years ago. There are buildings and gigantic cranes there now that would have been impossible to imagine before,” he said.
Yet whether they perform as the Machine or as Gillian Welch (nominally one person, but onstage, a symbiotic two), they are both preservationists and inventors. They have a keen ear for acoustics and a great sensitivity to thematic transmission, finding new ways to say old things and vice versa. At Welch’s recent show at the Lobero on October 1, the duo finished the night with a cover of “Long Black Veil” sans amplification, just singing out into the dark.