Writing about music is always a slightly odd exercise (dancing about architecture, as the cliche goes), so I don’t feel any hesitation about beginning these words on neo-Appalachian songstress Gillian Welch’s most recent, Soul Journey, by writing about writing (indeed, depending on how you read, by writing about writing about writing...), thus:

In his rather splendid The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera does a wonderful riff on Anna Karenina, and in particular on the seemingly somewhat stylised way in which trains function as the starting and ending points of the grand love affair. Kundera reckons that it’s reasonable to say that Tolstoy’s device is rather overly ‘fictional’ and ‘literary’, but only if you concede that this is how we create our own lives - we look for themes and imbue them with significance, constructing our lives according to principles of beauty (at least in ideal terms) and aesthetic form.

Now, I get the sense that Kundera’s cultural palette is more ‘high’ than ‘popular’, but I think he would have approved of - or at least recognised - the way in which albums and songs can come to fill particular functions in the patterns of our lives. For me, one such pattern is that each summer seems to have one particular album which, in retrospect, seems to’ve been everywhere in the air over that time. I’m pretty sure that 2000/01 was Powderfinger’s Odyssey Number Five; from 01/02, it was Natalie Merchant’s Tigerlily; in 02/03 it was Aimee Mann’s Bachelor No 2; in 03/04 it was Wilco’s Summerteeth - and in 04/05, Gillian Welch’s Soul Journey.

Indeed, the most striking thing about Soul Journey is its summeriness. At this stage in her career, Welch has, it seems, largely moved beyond the relatively unadorned bluegrassy and trad-folk flavour of her earlier recordings, now mining a perhaps richer and certainly broader seam of rootsy americana, in terms of both instrumental palette and general ethos - I fancy that Gram’s old term ‘cosmic american music’ ain’t a mile away from what’s going on here.

The sound isn’t as old-timey as on any of Welch’s previous, uniformly great albums, 1996’s Revival, 1998’s Hell Among The Yearlings and 2001’s Time (The Revelator) but it’s equally warm and dusty-feeling - and equally great. There’s an end-of-day languor to it all - a sense of the interstices between sunshine and shadow, of hazy still afternoons flowing into breeze-touched evenings, of drift and ebb and flow, and of the necessary relationship between transience and permanency. Music that exists in the intersections of country, folk and more popular stylings today is, of its nature, in a sense suspended between past and present - informed by and tied to what has come before it (not least the suffering and hardship out of which ‘mountain’ music was born) - and Welch seems to have achieved some kind of contingently perfect synthesis out of this ongoing process of retrieval and renewal...it’s somehow out of time.

What does this mean ‘on the ground’ of Soul Journey, as it were? Well, it means acoustic guitar, dobro, fiddle, unobtrusive drums, and sometimes bass and (I think) even organ, and all melded into something which feels old and new all at once. And then, of course, there’s Welch’s wonderful yawn (in the best possible way) of a voice. A lot of the warmth of this music comes directly from that voice - down to earth and forthright, and yet somehow expressive and delicate, too. A voice which is crystalline, not in a perfect Alison Krauss kind of way (something which I say without meaning any disparagement of Krauss’s lovely and amazing voice!), but instead has echoes of history and life woven in with its clarity...if that latter’s voice is silvery, then perhaps Welch’s is golden.

Most of the songs are original compositions, albeit steeped in the traditions on which Welch draws, though two traditional numbers - “Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor” and “I Had A Real Good Mother And Father” - are given the treatment and done proud. There’s a pleasing simplicity to the arrangements; in fact, this simplicity characterises all of the numbers on Soul Journey. These are songs that can be enjoyed even by those who usually never listen to ‘country’ or ‘folk’ or any of that jazz - it’s not that they transcend as such, but more that they seem to uncover, or penetrate beneath, these kinds of generic distinctions to something deeper and more real. Call it ‘authentic’, perhaps, if you bear in mind that authenticity isn’t about submission to constraining dogmas or obsolete prescriptions and has rather more to do with the realisation of a kind of fundamental truth.

Opener “Look At Miss Ohio” sets the tone, with its subtly layered, slowly building (but never quite resolving) yearn; it and fellow album bookend “Wrecking Ball” are clear highlights even amidst the consistent quality of the whole. “Wrecking Ball” in particular really is something else; preceded by the wistful prettiness of “One Little Song” and “I Made A Lovers Prayer”, it picks the pace up a bit, and fills out those implied spaces to create a fuller sound than anywhere previously on the album, swinging Soul Journey home on the back of a scything fiddle, prominent guitars, Welch’s voice, and a gorgeous melody...it brings my heart into my throat nearly every time. In a way, it - and the album as a whole - does, as Welch sings, show us colours we’d never seen, but it’s the kind of showing that brings with it the realisation that, after all, those colours were always already there.

Well, here in Australia, spring is flowing by and summer comes ever nearer, and for me, this summer will be another personal Rubicon, for once it’s over, I’ll have finally passed from the tranquil waters of university into whatever the ‘real’ world may hold for me, and I’m beginning to wonder how everything will turn out. In relation to music, anyway, my past ‘summer soundtracks’ have only really been identifiable retrospectively, and this is apt as far as Soul Journey goes, for the album is, in at least one important sense, all about looking both forwards and back while finding a space in the present moment - a suitable companion as our journeys continue ever unfolding before and within us.

Recommended: Yes