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The Champion: David Rawlings Steps Out Front (Relix Revisited)

“We recognized that, in most cases, it’s helpful for me to have a baritone vocal,” says Rawlings of singing below Welch, rather than forcing her vocals up high. “That was the crazy thing about making this record, that so much of what we’d learned didn’t work. ‘Method Acting’ was the one song on there that worked sort of in the way we would have cut a Gillian record, just with the vocals switched.”

That figures into which songs are on Friend of a Friend, and which ones will wind up on the long-awaited Gillian Welch record. Rawlings half-joking says that it will be “the happiest day of my life” when her record is completed, one that after many false starts is expected this year. When they personalize Oberst’s lyrics, you know what they’re referring to.

So, T-Bone, please keep the tape rolling
Gill, keep strumming that guitar
We need a record of our failures
We must document our love

Some songs, Rawlings says, just didn’t fit Welch’s strengths. The two wrote “Sweet Tooth” with Whispertown 2000 frontman Morgan Nagler. It’s a slightly inadvertent revision of the old “Candyman” tradition. Rawlings wanted to play around with that old country blues pattern. Welch had been meaning to write a song about a sweet tooth—which is, after all, addiction—in this case, to love, sex, drugs, candy. (“I wanna be your honey, but I got a sweet tooth.”) The subject and the metaphor keep changing for at least a quadruple entendre. The rhyme scheme keeps shifting, the rhythm of the language speeds up, a tambourine comes in stompin’, and suddenly you’re out there on the street a-buskin’ and a-clappin’. It’s a remarkable track—complex and challenging, lyrically clever and fun.

But the steady-rolling finger-picking style that Welch uses while singing lead didn’t play to that playful, phantasmagoric dynamic. So Rawlings took it. On other songs, they’d work and work without success until Welch sang lead. Those went into her pile of songs to record.

“The only song on there that I feel like we maybe stole a little bit [away] from being a potentially great sounding Gill record, is ‘Bells of Harlem,’” Rawlings says, “which I think she would have crushed. But I figured to take one song for the record is kind of OK.”

It’s a beautiful song, delicate and prettily arranged, like an early ‘60s soul record with on acoustic guitars, with strings and Wurlitzer.

That really seems to be what Rawlings is chasing. He considers himself less of a guitarist than an arranger. He creates some moods on this record. You want to hear these songs with all of the scratches and pops and treble zing of an old 78 record.

This take on old-time music is not a put-on. It’s rooted in a deep knowledge, and a life approach that follows the age-old musician’s tradition. Rawlings surely doesn’t think of himself as a guitar hero but he’s set himself on the folk hero’s journey. He’s cast his fate—as a producer and a partner, as a player and a singer—by championing others. And isn’t the champion the oldest type of musician there is?