Gillian Welch and David Rawlings on returning to Australia and saying no to Zach Bryan

The highly acclaimed American country music duo Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are set to visit Australia for the third time this month, with a two-week run of theater shows in Sydney and Melbourne. Their shows have rapidly sold out, which comes as no surprise to their fans. Both are top-tier songwriters, and their live performances are captivating and have the power to be transformative.

Their stunning combination of musical talent and soul-stirring vocals is chilling, and the intimacy they bring to any room sets their shows apart. This intimacy is paramount, but it also comes at a cost. Some simple calculations would show that Welch and Rawlings could have visited Australia far more quickly than they do.

Their five sold-out shows at Melbourne's Hamer Hall will see them perform to over ten thousand people, and their three sold-out shows at the Sydney Opera House will cater to a similar number. But anyone who has seen Welch and Rawlings perform understands that watching them in a soulless arena would be sacrilege. And the duo knows better than anyone that it simply wouldn't work.

Speaking to Saturday Night Country host Becky Cole about the venues for this tour, Rawlings said, “Both of those rooms are just such great-sounding rooms. We’ve never had any desire to move into bigger venues than that because even at that size we want to be able to capture that kind of intimacy that we’ve been performing with for all these years. I’d rather do ten nights in a room we love and think we can put on our best show than play in a giant stadium where people aren’t going to get that same experience.”

It’s easy to say, but putting it into practice is another thing entirely. Welch and Rawlings have consistently walked the talk. Rawlings said, “Zach Bryan, who is very kind and asked us to open for him at a stadium in Atlanta, he plays big venues all the time. I know a lot of people would jump at that. I love his music, and I would have loved to have done that show, but we were like, ‘Sorry, we can’t do that. The thing that you like about us isn’t going to translate to a football field, so we’re just going to politely decline.’”

The space they perform in is particularly important because Welch and Rawlings even eschew basic technology in their pursuit of the perfect live sound. “At the end of the day, we’re still pretty close to chamber music,” Welch said. “We’re playing acoustic instruments. There are no pickups on the stage. I sometimes feel like the theater is almost another member of the band. It has a big effect on how we play.”

Welch and Rawlings first toured Australia in 2004, their flawless performances leaving east coast audiences in awe. In a 2022 retrospective review, I wrote, “People got goosebumps as absolute perfection unfolded before us. Such beautiful, organic, expertly played music felt like it should be in a glass case.” Rawlings recalled, “Both of those tours were just so memorable for us.” Welch added, “I don’t know if people thought we would actually come because we’re notoriously not fans of flying. So, it was like, people were incredulous and so happy that we were there. I’ve never felt anything quite like that.”

While visiting Australia isn’t easy for the duo, who have been open about their struggles with flying, they guarantee it’s always worth it. On their second trip, the band flew into Perth and then jumped in a car and drove across the entire country, avoiding more flights. Rawlings said, “I had this crazy idea, ‘Let’s go to Perth and drive across the Nullarbor and tour our way to Brisbane and Byron Bay and then fly my band in and tour back to Melbourne. Let’s just be there and see as much of the country as we can.’”

“That’s why we like touring in America and always have, we know the country so well because we’ve driven countless miles ourselves. We don’t do buses, we don’t want to, because you lose so much. What you learn, what you experience when you travel in a car yourself.” That cross-Australia trip was well worth it, allowing the duo to see parts of the country many of us never will. “The pictures we took don’t even look real,” Welch said. “At one point, we pulled over close to the longest straight stretch of road on earth (the Eyre Highway in Western Australia). We got out of the car and walked out onto the red dirt. It was just so unusual.”

“I’ve never seen a landscape like that, and that’s saying something because, as Dave said, we’ve driven a million miles in this country [the US]. We’ve never seen anything like that.” In 2020, after decades of collaboration and appearing on each other’s records, the pair released All The Good Times, a collection of cover songs and their first duo album. 2024 has seen the release of Woodland, which includes the first original material from Welch since 2011’s The Harrow & The Harvest, and Rawlings’ first original material since 2017’s Poor David’s Almanack.

Welch said, “When we actually get down to making a record, we tend to do it in about six weeks. But it takes us a long time to get the songs together. I wish we could write songs faster, but it is what it is.” Fans will be delighted to hear that the duo have written a wealth of material in between their two albums. Given its inherent versatility, this has given the pair a lot of options when it comes to how they package their final product. Welch said, “We have almost two albums’ worth of songs, or two albums’ worth of songs, and have been kind of wrestling with, ‘Well, maybe it’s a double album, or maybe it’s an album under my name and an album under Dave’s name.’”

Rawlings added, “All of a sudden, we found this group of songs that we had finished that spoke to each other and felt like there was a theme. We’re really happy to have gotten to that point. And we were probably as surprised as anyone that all of a sudden, there was an album.” Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ Australian tour begins at the Sydney Opera House on January 23.