?Dave RawlingsIf you’ve ever seen country music maven Gillian Welch perform live, you’ve witnessed Dave Rawlings’ masterful guitar stylings, even if you didn’t know it at the time. Though Rawlings isn’t credited on Welch’s records as a main contributor (a deliberate decision on both his and Welch’s parts), he has been Welch’s steadfast collaborator throughout her career: Not only did Rawlings co-write much if not all of Welch’s catalog, he’s also produced her records, Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker and Old Crow Medicine Show’s self-titled release, among others. He also performs with Old Crow Medicine Show on occasion.You’d think a man who’s been an integral contributor to so many different Americana artists’ work would put out plenty of his own records, too, but his November ’09 release A Friend of A Friend, a nine-track melange of covers and original songs new and old, is Rawlings’ first release with his band the Dave Rawlings Machine. In the subsequent interview, Rawlings reveals which of his friend-musicians will be performing with him on this tour along with Gillian Welch, discusses what it’s like being in the spotlight for the first time, learning to like his less-than-perfect singing voice, how recording his own album is different from recording with Gillian Welch, and how “To Be Young” could have wound up as nothing more than a jam session at a Nashville party. Rawlings plays Showbox at the Market on Sunday, February 14. First of all, who can we expect to see accompanying you on this tour?We’re currently touring as a five piece with Gillian Welch, of course, playing guitar and singing and then three of the guys from Old Crow Medicine Show: Ketch Secor, Morgan Jahnig and Willie Watson.That’s super exciting! I wasn’t sure if you’d have the folks who contributed to the record, or a different touring band. Glad to hear it’s going to be the former.I’ve been really excited. I was really fortunate that they’ve been able to come out and do some of these dates. I was really fortunate to get them on the record, but obviously thy have a large career of their own and have a lot of things to do. So I did one run with them when the record came out around the Southeast, and I thought that was all we were going to be able to do together, but as it turned out they had a lot of fun and we were able to carve out a little chunk of time here to play on the West Coast. This is a special tour for us, anyway, because we don’t get to tour together that much. It’s possible that our friend Benmont Tench, who played on the record also and of course is a member of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, [will be there, too]. Benmont is threatening to come to certain shows on this run. I don’t know exactly which ones, but where he has time he’s probably going to fly up and play some keyboards with us too. It’s going to be a fun show; I’m just not sure where that’s going to happen. Have you found yourself the subject of more media attention than you’re accustomed to?I never really was happy about doing interviews particularly, before. I just always felt like, I didn’t think I did that good of a job. For years I didn’t really do any at all. With this it’s been nice though because there’s more of a cause for me to be talking, with this being my little project. Gillian and I, as this record was getting close to…I mean, we were never sure if we were even gonna finish it, but as we were getting more stuff inthe can that we thought was good, we were a little worried about releasing it in any case because we weren’t sure if the perception would really be that it was just a side project, and if it wouldn’t receive any attention and if all of the effort of trying to promote it, if it all would sort of not be worth it. Fortunately, the record’s been received well and people treated it as though it were an actual, well, record. I don’t know how else to say it. We’ve been able to do this tour and it’s been terrific. So far everything’s been very positive. And of course I’ve gotten a lot of support through other people I’ve worked with. Conor [Oberst], of course, was really gracious. There’s been good connections with all the people I worked with in the past. How much time did you spend on this not-side project?You know, the recording process wasn’t that long…We went into the studio to do some work on Gillian’s next record and also to record some with the thought, ‘Well, let’s see if this stuff pans out, and see if we’re interested in releasing a record under my name.’ I feel like we went into the studio last year in about May, and um…it took about the same length of time as Gillian’s records generally have. I feel like we were in the studio for about five or six weeks, you know, not straight, but here and there. Obviously there was some extra time to finish it, and when we did the strings on a few tracks, that was a few months later out. It’s not like we’re making Dark Side of the Moon here or something, one of these legendary records you hear about that take two years in the studio.Plus some of the songs on the album are covers and were written years ago. There were a couple of them that we pulled from a while ago and also, when I’m performing in the studio I tend to do better on early takes, you know. It’s not, like, something we can labor over. All the songs on the record were recorded live and there weren’t really overdubs or anything. It’s been the way we made records. So that makes it harder to spend a lot of time in the studio.Is that the case when you record with Gillian Welch, too?Yeah. and in fact most of the people I’ve ever recorded with work that way. I feel like that’s a commonality across the artists I respond to and feel a kinship with. There’s a certain amount of spontaneity. In some of the other interviews I’ve read, you say that you never really felt like you had an amazing voice, but that it’s sort of matured into something you thought you could work with. Is that why you waited so long to make your own record?That’s part of it. also, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of amazing musicians in roles that I’m very comfortable in. There’s a certain part of me that is a very natural fit if I’m producing a record or doing some engineering or playing guitar. All these things come more naturally to me than being a frontperson. It was comfortable and great. I feel like it would be a much sadder thing if I was sitting here saying to you, ‘And for years and years I just wished I could make my record, but I never could because these people were stopping me and I couldn’t summon the courage, but I wanted to so bad!” It wasn’t like that. I was really enjoying making music, but when I did start to hear my voice turn into something I thought was a little…that we enjoyed more than we had, and also I kept in mind that I love singers who have voices that are similar to mine… It’s just very difficult to listen to your own in someone else’s ears. It’s very difficult to enjoy in that sense, at least for me.So when that started to happen, it really did sort of push me toward [making a record]. Well, that, and also when we played those shows, the first Machine shows, as I’m sure you’ve read or could probably find a good quote about that that will be better than what I can say right now, we wanted to fit in a few new Gillian Welch songs without putting them in her show. We realized that when we played those shows, there was a different kind of energy and the music felt different to us, and we were learning and were sort of able to take something back to Gillian’s music. and hopefully the Crows will take something back from this experience to their next project. It was good to offer that, even more so than what you think of what you’re giving to the listening public, it’s nice to play a kind of music or feel like the people that you’re working with are going to be able to take something back with them, because everyone’s different.You seem to prefer writing songs with others, too, rather than writing alone. That’s how I work, yeah. I love writing with other people. I find it to be a really wonderful experience if you’re working with someone who has an initial idea or you can take an initial idea to someone and sit there and hash it out. It’s nice to have two peoples’ perspective, to be coming at an idea from two sets of experiences and two sets of musical angles. In the case of the Ryan song, the song I wrote with Ryan Adams, that was a funny experience of sitting down with him at a party and we were just playing music and he started singing this thing and I thought, “Oh, what is this song?” And I realized he was making it up. And so I added a little something to it, and so we sat and played it for a little while, but we got distracted. Someone came in the room or something. Who knows? But I remembered what we’d played and I’d gotten up the next morning and thought, “That was a cool thing,” And I worked on it a little more, and the next time I saw him, I was like, “We should finish that song we were working on!” and he was like, “What song?” He had no recollection at all. Actually, it’s one of my favorite songs of his – and yours. I love that song, and I’ve sung it over the years at Gillian shows or for my own enjoyment, but I was really happy to put a slightly different version…I mean, his version of it is tremendous, so there’s no competitive spirit in it. I just thought I’d do a little bit of a country version in it because I thought it was a fun song to sing and I wanted to be able to play it at my shows and have it be part of my music.What was the most difficult thing about recording these songs? I feel like the most challenging thing with any of these tracks was trying to remove myself slightly from how I would record with Gillian, because we tried a lot of the songs that way, with just the two of us sitting down in a more stable acoustic duet setting, and we didn’t like what we got there. It wasn’t until we sort of brought the Crows in and started gradually going through them that I started hearing stuff that I thought people would enjoy…”Method Acting and Cortez the Killer,” the fusion of [those two songs into one track] was sort of an odd accident one night live and ended up being the same accident when we were in the studio. We played a couple takes of it, or maybe one take, and it’s sort of a long song and it’s obviously a little bit on the slow side. And so the second time I sort of drifted off into “Cortez the Killer,” mainly to entertain the engineer, Matt, who was in there. We played it a few other times also without putting “Cortez” on it, but when I listened back to everything, that was the take that had the most sort of magic to it. So we used it. And like, “Monkey and the Engineer” was a song I didn’t intend to record at all. I just sang it live a couple of times and with Gillian, not even with the Crows, and I thought we would sing it one morning to like, warm up. And by the time we’d been through it two or three times it sounded really good, so I was like, “Let’s sing it a few more times.” By the time we played it five or six times, it was really good. On “I Hear Them All,” I tried to record that a number of ways and wasn’t happy with any of them. And I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone who’s a great artist, and he said, “Well, when I get stuck on a record a lot of times I go in and try to record something just by myself.” And I thought, well, that’s a good idea I had never considered, just going in and doing something as a pure solo piece. So I went in and started working on it, and in three days I was pretty much completely despondent and virtually in tears at the fact that I just couldn’t get anything I liked by myself, and all of a sudden it just sort of spilled out. It’s funny. It’s a funny process. What I’ve learned over the years is that you can’t really want anything in particular, because you’re not going to get that. You just need to be open and be trying really hard and be aware when you’ve hit something, and accept it, and accept that if it’s got some magic to it, you need to use it. I understand you had some other songs you wrote by yourself that didn’t make it on the record; is that why?It’s nice to have that stuff around because there’s a certain flavor to some of those that I quite like, but I haven’t really found the way that I think people will feel them correctly yet. And now we’re finishing some songs for Gillian’s next record, and here and there some things are popping up that I might add to the show, or some newish songs for another project of mine in the future. I don’t know that it’s going to be as many years before I make another one of these. It may happen sooner than I think. So when can we expect to hear Gillian’s new record?Oh yeah, that’s on the top of the list and we’re partially…we did some of it as we were making mine, so we just need to finish some more songs and get in there and finish it this spring. Could we expect to some of those songs, perhaps, at your show?Maybe one or two. We’re not gonna play a lot of them because with the Crows and Gillian, we’ve sort of been playing a few songs of Gillian’s that people know and want to hear, and the Crows have been singing a song, and the shows have been fairly full. So with those sort of unreleased tracks, probably not more than one. There just hasn’t been time really and also… it’s been a little harder since the advent of YouTube and bit torrents of live shows and all this. You feel a little less comfortable at a show just busting out some half-baked idea and playing it because, you know, people end up–I mean not a lot of people – but there’s a certain element of people who hear all of that stuff and end up compiling it and circulating it. Which I sort of support, and I’ve listened to the same sort of things from artists that I love, but it does make you…There used to be a certain wonderful thing about when you were in some city and you’re working on something and you’re like, “I have no idea if this is any good, but let’s just play it at the show and see how we like playing it,” and knowing that those people got to hear it, but you weren’t playing it for the whole world. It was just mentally a nice place. But now it feels like if you play anything, you’re playing it for the whole world.That must be daunting.It’s a change. And to some degree you get used to it. But like I said, it does make me — and I think Gillian and I know other artists I’ve talked to have had the same feeling — just a little less willing to maybe show creative stuff until they feel more comfortable with it.Dave, thank you so much for talking to me. For someone who didn’t use to like doing interviews, it’s been great.Part of it is just that I talk a lot, so in the case of doing interviews when they would want both Gillian and I to talk, I would just feel like I would talk too much. And then at the end I’d be like, “Oh God, did I say the wrong thing?” You tend to second guess. But in my case I have no excuse. There’s no one else you can talk to. In the case of Gillian and I, you can talk to Gil and you’ll probably get better stuff out of her, but in this case I’m the only guy. She’s had a lot of practice.

It’s been really interesting, the things you learn being a frontman up there – where your attention has to be. You’re connected to the audience in a different way, which has been an interesting and good experience. I can kinda get used to it, I suppose. Well, now you’ll have to because people are going to start knowing who you are after all that time not being credited on Gillian Welch’s records.That was sort of a choice that we both made about not having a band name, and not calling it Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings or something like that. I never liked big long band names with two peoples’ names that don’t fit on a marquee. And Gillian of course has this amazing talent and could make records [without me]. It’s great to make records with her and be involved, but it’s never been an essential…it’s never been a thing where she couldn’t make a record if I drifted off. It was just our decision we made and I’m comfortable with it. It was very nice of people to feel like I was being put upon in some way.They just wanted to defend you.That’s what I mean. It’s very sweet. I thank them for their concern. So are you going to be at the show?Of course. I can think of no better way to spend Valentine’s Day.Well, maybe we’ll sneak in a love song. I’m excited to know where I’ll be on Valentines Day. I’ll have to talk to the guys and see if we can think of maybe one little special thing to do or something.That would be amazing. Although I kinda like love songs that are about heartbreak. Me too. Maybe I’ll sing “Banks of the Ohio” or something where everyone dies.That would be appropriate.Yeah, where people fall in love and they kill each other.