There is a comic moment, somewhere towards the middle of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ second set, where Rawlings pauses to strap on a harmonica. To do this, he has to remove his cowboy hat, a gesture that provokes a roar from the audience, and a smattering of wolf whistles. Welch turns to face her partner. “That’s how little they expect from us,” she says, deadpan.
There is a knee solo, some hillbilly dancing and a roar from the crowd
There is a comic moment, somewhere towards the middle of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ second set, where Rawlings pauses to strap on a harmonica. To do this, he has to remove his cowboy hat, a gesture that provokes a roar from the audience, and a smattering of wolf whistles. Welch turns to face her partner. “That’s how little they expect from us,” she says, deadpan.
They launch into “Six White Horses” from Welch’s 2011 album The Harrow and the Harvest. It’s a beautiful song, a poetic rendering of impending sorrow, delivered with minimal decoration. Rawlings plucks the tune on a banjo. Welch slaps out the rhythm on her thighs, underscoring it with the stomping of her boot heel. There is a knee solo, some hillbilly dancing and a roar from the crowd. As they do at the end of every song, Welch and Rawlings freeze, and smile to each other as if freshly amazed. Welch permits herself a joke, declaring the grand Palladium stage to be “a way above average” for clogging.
The whole evening seems to exist on the fringes of mortality
It’s not the only song about death. In fact, the whole evening, from the opening “Elvis Presley Blues” to the final encore of “I’ll Fly Away” seems to exist on the fringes of mortality. As they sing on “Lawman”, “everything’s dust to dust”. There’s a moment in “Elvis Presley Blues” where Welch accentuates the line “bless my soul, what’s wrong with me?” turning the shorthand of Presley’s youthful exuberance into a prophesy of doom. “I’ll Fly Away”, meanwhile, is delivered with the joyful exultation of a tent revival meeting, with Rawlings pogoing on the boards as he teases that final hallelujah.
As on their last LP, Woodland, Welch and Rawlings get equal billing, sharing the stage with upright bass player Paul Kowert, who sometimes bows the strings, and occasionally (as on Rawlings’ “Midnight Train”) making like the Tennessee Two. More often, he offers deep shading for contrasting guitars of Rawlings and Welch. Welch is percussive. Rawlings is just extraordinary. He plays his guitar as if it is a saxophone, embarking on spidery runs that seem to bend the time signatures of the songs out of shape. At his most intense, he looks like a man trying to sail a skiff in a hurricane, shifting his balance, craning his neck, as the power of the guitar jolts through him.
A shift in emphasis from more straightforward country strums to more expressive songs
The set includes much of Woodland, and nothing from Welch’s first two albums. Musically, that means a shift in emphasis from more straightforward country strums to the more expressive songs of later albums. Rawlings sings “Midnight Train”, “Ruby” and “Cumberland Gap”, offering a reminder that he is an underrated songwriter. Likewise “Hashtag”, his celebration of the late Guy Clark, the lyric of which places Rawlings and Welch as reluctant inheritors of the Texan songwriter’s mantle as the poet of truckstops and parking lots.
The most expressive instrument, though, is Welch’s voice. She sings with such crystal clarity that the sadness of the songs is made somehow bearable. These are tunes of such sweet mourning. The imagery of “Empty Trainload of Sky” could hardly be bleaker, but Welch coaxes the beauty from the landscape. Conversely, “Everything Is Free” may be a song about the penury of musicians in a time of streaming, but it arrives here as a more expansive lament for hard times. There are a couple of mood switches: a sweet cover of the Grateful Dead’s “China Doll”; and the penultimate encore, “Goodnight”, a Guy Clark-style talking song that sounds romantic, but could equally be the last farewell of a dying man. The highlight, though, is an extended “Revelator”, which spirals out of Rawlings’ guitar like a Southern Gothic “Marquee Moon”, its dark mystery reflected in the clear spring water of Welch’s singing.
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings setlist for London Palladium, October 26, 2025
Set 1
Elvis Presley Blues
Midnight Train
Empty Trainload of Sky
Howdy Howdy
Cumberland Gap
The Bells And The Birds
Turf The Gambler
Wayside/Back in Time
Ruby
The Way It Goes
Set 2
Lawman
What We Had
Hard Times
Hashtag
Six White Horses
Wrecking Ball
China Doll
Red Clay Halo
Encore 1
Everything Is Free
Look At Miss Ohio
Encore 2
Revelator
Goodnight
I’ll Fly Away
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