Gillian Welch doesn’t write happy songs. She doesn’t paint lyrical portraits outlining the beauty of the changing seasons. She doesn’t deliver prose laden in lacy love metaphors. It’s not in her DNA.
The themes of the Grammy Award winner’s songs are born on another side of the spectrum, the more dimly-lit side, musty and unsettling extreme.
Disconnection, family trauma, drug addiction, mining deaths, murder and a killer of rapists represent a small sample of the motifs that populate her songs.
The unrushed and stripped-down instrumental parts that Welch and longtime songwriter partner/bandmate Dave Rawlings pair with the darker themes move entrancingly, like a slow pulse, driven mostly by just a single guitar.
After Grammy nods, an assortment of other accolades and Top Albums of the Year lists, Welch and Rawlings picked up a Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting at the 2015 Americana Awards in Nashville.
The 47-year-old has said that she doesn’t force the songwriting; her most potent material surfaces only when she’s “totally miserable.”
And only Welch has the skill to make misery sound so sweet.
At nearly 15 minutes long, Welch’s sprawling literary masterpiece in song form “I Dream a Highway” echoes the reoccurring theme of the record Time (The Revelator): the slow death of the American dream. Through a minimalistic instrumental landscape touched by Appalachian roots and the Dust Bowl Refugees of the ’30s, Welch’s biblical and popular culture references and rhythmic flow add up to the closest thing to Bob Dylan: “Now, give me some of what you’re having, I’ll take you as a viper into my head/ A knife into my bed, arsenic when I’m fed.”
Welch’s poetic chops cut deeper with “Dark Turn of Mind,” off 2011’s The Harrow & The Harvest: “And leave me if I’m feeling too lonely, full as the fruit on the vine/ You know some girls are bright as the morning, and some have a dark turn of mind.”
A couple weeks ago, Welch and Rawlings released Nashville Obsolete, their second under the Dave Rawlings Machine moniker.
One of the record’s highlights seems like a slight thematic departure – in a good way – from the duo’s previous work: The 10-minute-plus winding “The Trip” features a plot that includes “travelers boarding a train with a body, and a handkerchief and a hatchet.”
GILLIAN WELCH 8pm Friday, Oct. 2. Golden State Theatre, 417 Alvarado St., Monterey. $34-$40. 649-1070, www.folkyeah.com
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