SONG OF THE DAY

“I Made A Lover’s Prayer” by Gillian Welch (Soul Journey, Acony Records, 2003). Written by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

WHERE I HEARD IT

On CBS’ detective drama Criminal Minds, season 5.

BRIEF BIO (a la wikipedia)

– Soul Journey is the fourth studio album by Gillian Welch.

– As with all of her previous releases, it is a collaboration with her David Rawlings.

– In their preceding work, Time (The Revelator), Welch and Rawlings had experimented with using only acoustic guitar and banjo as accompaniment. With Soul Journey, they return to the more diverse and modern instrumentation of their early work, employing electric guitar, organ, and drums.

– Their sparse and dark musical style, which combines elements of Appalachian music, Bluegrass, and Americana, is described by The New Yorker as “at once innovative and obliquely reminiscent of past rural forms”.

– Welch and Rawlings have released four critically acclaimed albums. Their 1996 debut, Revival, and the 2001 release Time (The Revelator), received nominations for the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

– Welch was an associate producer and performed on two songs of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, a platinum album that won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2002.

– Gillian Howard Welch was born on October 2, 1967 in New York City, and was adopted by Ken and Mitzie Welch, comedy and music entertainers. Her biological mother was a freshman in college, and her father was a musician visiting New York City. Welch has speculated that her biological father could have been one of her favorite musicians, and she later discovered from her adoptive parents that he was a drummer.

– When Welch was three, her adoptive parents moved to Los Angeles to write music for The Carol Burnett Show. They also appeared on The Tonight Show.

– While in high school, a local television program featured her as a student who “excelled at everything she did”.

– When a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Welch played bass in a goth band, and drums in a psychedelic surf band. In college, a roommate played an album by the bluegrass band The Stanley Brothers, and she had an epiphany:

The first song came on and I just stood up and I kind of walked into the other room as if I was in a tractor beam and stood there in front of the stereo. It was just as powerful as the electric stuff, and it was songs I’d grown up singing. All of a sudden I’d found my music.

– After graduating from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in photography, Welch attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she majored in songwriting.

– Welch met her music partner David Rawlings at a successful audition for Berklee’s only country band.

– Upon finishing college in 1992, Welch and Rawlings moved to Nashville, Tennessee. She recalled, “I looked at my record collection and saw that all the music I loved had been made in Nashville—Bill Monroe, Dylan, the Stanley Brothers, Neil Young—so I moved there. Not ever thinking I was thirty years too late.” Rawlings soon followed.

– They never considered using a working name, so the duo were simply billed as “Gillian Welch”.

– Allmusic’s Zac Johnson wrote that it was “too casual and off-the-cuff”, but called it a “wonderful, dusty summertime front-porch album, full of whiskey drawls and sly smiles, floorboard stomps and screen-door creaks”. Jon Caramanica of Rolling Stone criticized the slower songs as stagnant, but complimented the upbeat songs. Soul Journey also garnered significant acclaim. John Harris of Mojo magazine described the album as “pretty much perfect”, and Uncuts Barney Hoskyns favorably compared it to Bob Dylan and The Band’s The Basement Tapes. Will Hermes of Entertainment Weekly wrote that Welch has “never sounded deeper, realer [sic], or sexier.”

– Soul Journey peaked at #107 on the Billboard charts, and reached #3 for Independent Albums.

– Welch has received broad critical praise. Geoffrey Himes of The Washington Post described Welch as “one of the most interesting singer-songwriters of her generation”. In 2003, Tom Kielty of The Boston Globe observed that she was “quietly establishing one of the most impressive catalogs in contemporary roots music”, and a 2007 piece in The Guardian by John Harris called Welch “one of the decade’s greatest talents”. Critic Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “At every turn, she demonstrates a spark and commitment that should endear her to anyone from country and folk to pop and rock fans who appreciate imagination and heart.”

– Welch has recorded songs with a variety of notable artists, including Ryan Adams, Ani DiFranco, Emmylou Harris, Jay Farrar, Alison Krauss, Old Crow Medicine Show, Bright Eyes, Robyn Hitchcock, Steve Earle, Ralph Stanley, Solomon Burke and Mark Knopfler.

VIDEO OF THE DAY