The guitarist and songwriter Dave Rawlings records music in his own studio, which, in the 21st century, does not make him unusual. With laptops and Pro Tools rigs, every musician is a producer these days, every tiled bathroom a potential echo chamber. But the familiar East Nashville, Tenn., confines of Woodland Sound Studios—where Dave Rawlings Machine’s second album, Nashville Obsolete, was recorded earlier this year—is no homemade operation because Dave Rawlings is no mere guy with a guitar.

Dave Rawlings is a gentleman of the old Nashville. The new, old Nashville, that is. Not the old, old Nashville, and definitely not the new, new Nashville. While it is almost impossible to tell where generations start and stop in the country-music capital of the world, Dave Rawlings is unquestionably of an earlier epoch. Though a New England transplant, he has been at home in Tennessee for decades. The mind out of time is a songwriter, performer, producer, engineer, studio owner and label head, though none of those occupations is exactly what set him and Woodland Sound apart from fresher arrivals in town, like Jack White, whose antenna-topped Third Man Records on the other side of the Cumberland River has become a locus for a new independent music scene in the city.

Woodland Sound Studios has been in operation, give or take, since 1966. In the ‘70s, Neil Young did sessions there for Comes A Time, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band tracked Will the Circle Be Unbroken and Kansas recorded “Dust in the Wind.” More pertinently, after it went dark for a short period, it is where Dave Rawlings and his comrade Gillian Welch have made their musical home since 2001.

One of the quietest power couples in popular music, a hers/his duo noted for Welch’s ghostly voice and Rawlings’ atmospheric, acoustic lead-guitar counterpoint, the two have made five albums under Welch’s name, earned Grammy nominations and—thanks to their participation in the best-selling soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?—helped directly spawn the latest folk-music revival. Most recently, they earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association and decidedly new, new Nashville star Miranda Lambert (from the reality show Nashville Star) recorded Welch and Rawlings’ “Look at Miss Ohio.”

The two have often described themselves as “a two-person act called Gillian Welch.” And, as of 2009, the pair constitutes the two primary members of another band called Dave Rawlings Machine. While Nashville Obsolete is, in some ways, a modest effort—seven songs tracked more or less live—it also puts on plain display what makes Rawlings different and what makes his and Welch’s partnership quite unlike anything else in contemporary music.

In the combination of Rawlings’ quizzical Jerry Garcia-like guitar, Welch’s voice and the pair’s haunted post-Dylan songwriting instincts, they have found a permanent portal into a far-off place. It doesn’t matter what the band is called. When Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch roll analog tape at Woodland Sound Studios, they’re not in Nashville anymore.

Neither Dave Rawlings nor Gillian Welch can pinpoint the moment when Dave Rawlings Machine tipped into existence. Welch uses the word “inevitable” to describe its birth. Rawlings had done some collaborative songwriting with Ryan Adams (“To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)” on 2000’s Heartbreaker) and Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor (“I Hear Them All,” on 2006’s Big Iron World, which Rawlings produced), and a bit of touring work with Bright Eyes (which yielded a cover of Conor Oberst’s “Method Acting”). Even before that, in the late ‘90s, Rawlings and Welch had played around Nashville, and a few points beyond, as a male-fronted rock group called The Esquires, with Welch on bass and Rawlings on vocals—sometimes with Adams sitting in—blasting out songs by Chuck Berry, Neil Young, The Meters and others.

“We realized it would enable us to perform more and to broaden what we felt comfortable artistically playing,” Welch says of the Machine. “We were aware that the duet was really tightly focused and somewhat confining, and we just wanted to play other stuff.” Such is Rawlings and Welch’s stature that the Machine’s debut gig was at the 2009 Newport Folk Festival, before the band had even recorded an album. And such is their quality that Dave Rawlings Machine continues to play the same large theaters where the duo usually performs.

It’s not quite going electric (they’d already done that to varying degrees, starting on their 1996 debut) so much as prying open a new musical space for the two, perhaps slightly more excitable while remaining equally as drumless. By the time they’d recorded 2009’s A Friend of a Friend, the Machine had already accumulated a small repertoire, including their own arrangements of “To Be Young” and “I Hear Them All” and a version of Jesse Fuller’s “Monkey and the Engineer.”

Despite their deserved reputation as songwriters, Welch insists multiple times that they are “album-oriented artists,” building batches of songs that connect in accidental and not-accidental ways, and Nashville Obsolete is the first album they’ve truly written for Dave Rawlings to sing. “It’s kind of like a book—each song is another chapter,” Welch says. “There is a main character, which is Dave.” She’s in there too, she says, but her role is different.

As in the band known as Gillian Welch (the G is hard, by the way), Rawlings and Welch share songwriting duties and vocals almost equally. The main difference, really, is that Rawlings often sings the verses and Welch comes in just behind, as opposed to the other way around. This time, the Machine is Rawlings, Welch and Punch Brothers bassist Paul Kowert, give or take the occasional string section. As designed, the Machine drives the two in new directions on Nashville Obsolete, all seven songs capable of cracking open the magical folk America they access with such seeming ease in the songs under Welch’s name, and finding some seedy new corners.

“We got into this pocket where the songs were long,” says Rawlings, “and part of the reason they’re all long is that they all have three sections. There’s kind of a verse, then a pre-chorus section and a chorus. That isn’t something we’ve done a lot, and that seemed to have something to do with the fact that I was the singer. If I was going to be self-deprecating, which I often am, it’s that a pre-chorus lets you bring a harmony in sooner, so you don’t have to carry quite as much, or it lets you have a tonal shift. Gill’s voice is just so nice to listen to that we often keep things pretty static because we enjoy just letting that texture happen and carry a lot of the mood.”

The two have been writing songs together for over 20 years now, since just after they relocated to Nashville in 1992, and Nashville Obsolete moves between a number of moods. At least one, the 11-minute half-spoken, mystical fantasia “The Trip,” Rawlings thinks could’ve ended up on a Gillian Welch record. “A lot of that was spontaneously composed,” he says. “Gill spat out a lot of that.”

Other pieces are far more anthemic than anything the two might be comfortable writing for one of their “duet records,” as Welch calls them. Welch hears some Led Zeppelin in the Rawlings Machine, perhaps in the big chorus of “Pilgrim (You Can’t Go Home),” despite the lack of electricity and drums. There is “Bodysnatchers,” transformed in the studio from a ‘65 Dylan stomp to a dreamy float. There is also “Candy,” a playful bauble strummed up at soundcheck one afternoon that could be straight from the Woody Guthrie songbook—a children’s song complete with double and triple entendres. It is, above all, folk music.

Published in the fall of 2015, Rise Again is a sequel to the best-selling Rise Up Singing, the folk-music songbook ubiquitous in liberal-arts college dorm rooms and certain types of summer camps from the late ‘80s on. The new edition contains the chords to some 1,200 more songs, and Welch and Rawlings are there in the book’s artist index, just below Doc Watson and The Weavers.

With three original songs—2001’s “I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll,” 1996’s “Orphan Girl,” 1998’s “Winter’s Come and Gone”—Welch and Rawlings are among the most represented of contemporary songwriters. In as much as there’s a modern American folk canon of acoustic music made after Dylan went electric, Welch and Rawlings are unquestionably part of it. (Others might argue that “To Be Young,” “Look at Miss Ohio” and 2001’s “Everything Is Free” belong there, too. For starters.)

“I’m always so happy when somebody wants to sing one of our songs,” says Rawlings, genuinely enthused about the pair’s inclusion in the songbook. “The amount of time we spend working on the songs, it’s nice to have them live their own little lives.”

But Rawlings and Welch’s contributions to contemporary folk music stretch beyond simply being excellent performers and writing songs that continue to be sung, which are both achievements in themselves. Through the surprise hit soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?—the Coen Brothers’ comedy set in the Deep South— Welch especially cemented her spot in modern folklore, appearing in a visual cameo, helping shape the soundtrack itself and providing an unforgettable song and voice to the film’s river sirens with “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby.” Building from Mrs. Sidney Carter’s 1959 recording (a lullaby fragment recorded by Alan Lomax), Welch’s version expanded the song with distinct new verses and bold new three-part harmonies, though it remained credited to “traditional” on the accompanying soundtrack.

“The Coens hired T Bone [Burnett]; T Bone hired me,” says Gillian. “I hired everybody else. When I step back from the little frustrations, like not getting credited for that song, what is very gratifying about O Brother is that it’s basically my record collection brought to life in the here and now. For me to be part of 12 million people discovering Ralph Stanley is awesome. Unbelievable.” Even a decade and a half later, Welch is giddy about it.

Beyond Welch’s version of “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby,” the O Brother soundtrack contained “I’ll Fly Away,” featuring a fourth verse that Welch wrote on demand when the song needed one for a scene in the film, and which has since turned up in songbooks. When she recorded a version of “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor” for 2003’s Soul Journey, she updated a lyric (“Then maybe your good man, he won’t know” became “Babe, I’m broke and I’ve got nowhere to go”), it, too, circulated with her new words. “I heard a chick singing ‘Pallet’ the other day and she sang my refrain that way because she was a girl,” Welch says.

Rawlings and Welch maintain their own shadow repertoire of songs they sing when they’re not onstage. During a recent two-week layover in California between a short run billed as Gillian Welch and the beginning of the Nashville Obsolete album tour, their current for-their-ears-only setlist includes “a lot of old-time brother team duets,” says Welch. “If we sing that type of material, we don’t have to decide who’s going to sing the next song because we’re both singing throughout. We’ll do a lot of Stanley Brothers songs and Monroe Brothers songs.

“It’s kind of all over the place,” Welch continues. “We sang a little bit of [Gordon Lightfoot’s] ‘Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ the other day. I love that song. That is a hallway with many doors. There’s a whole ‘60s psychedelia door. Those are whole rooms where we’ve just let, like, one song out.” Inside, Welch says, are songs by Pink Floyd and even The Moody Blues. “That’s just for entertainment,” Welch says, though she does hear both Floyd and Lightfoot turning up on Nashville Obsolete—the latter on “Short Haired Woman Blues.”

“I’m very happy with my anonymous contributions to the folk canon,” she laughs. “It is so weird. And it doesn’t matter. I’ve spent my life singing words that were written by people whose names I will never know. Let us not forget, somebody wrote those fucking words,” she marvels over all the strange verbiage that has been separated from its authors but retains life—hers now included. “Somebody wrote those words,” she says again.

One reason that David Rawlings is not a conventional folk guitarist can be traced to the first time he picked up a guitar. “My friend Glen wanted to play [Neil Young’s] ‘Heart Of Gold’ at the talent show and he was going to play harmonica. I asked my parents for a guitar and they got me a Mel Bay [instructional] book or two and this $30 guitar. But the Mel Bay books don’t have any chords in them, so I just started playing, and I didn’t know anyone who knew how to play guitar, so I just started playing melody and played through, however many books I played through, and at the end, I still didn’t know how to play ‘Heart Of Gold’ because I didn’t know you could play all the strings at once. I remember thinking to myself, ‘How does he do that?! It sounds so giant! It sounds so beautiful!’”

It is an almost outsider way to learn folk music—to go immediately to lead guitar, bypassing the chords required to play even the simplest Neil Young song. But (as Pete Seeger might attest) there’s no right or wrong way to make folk music, and Rawlings and Welch’s musically privileged Berklee College of Music educations served them well on their backward paths to simplicity.

“Even though the music I really liked was Bob Dylan and Neil Young, I was way more focused on being a guitar player in a band, or being a collaborative writer,” Rawlings says. “To this day, it’s still what’s natural to me.”

One word that does not describe Rawlings and Welch is prolific. In their two decades working together, even counting the two Dave Rawlings Machine albums, they have only recorded seven albums worth of originals. “It’s not hard to write a song,” Rawlings muses, starting out sounding like a songwriter and ending up sounding like an immovable force of new, old Nashville.

“If you forced me to write a song in the next 45 minutes, I could write one,” he says. “But writing one that bears repetition or separates itself from thousands of other songs is a completely different issue. And maybe it means we’ve made a lot fewer records than someone, and a few people I know come to mind that might write something one day and really like it, and the next day, they might write something else and they might really like that, too, and they might record all of that stuff. I’m definitely not going to say that the way we feel about that stuff is a better way to go about it—it may be worse, it might be a bad idea—but the truth is that’s who we are and how we feel, and there’s nothing to be done.”