Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings Release Home-Recorded Covers Album

At a time when we can’t go out and do the things we love, music provides some comfort at home, taking us places and uniting us with people if only in our minds. Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings have been traveling all sorts of backroads while staying home in Nashville, and they’ve decided to share some of their musical adventures.

Photos by Gillian Welch

Today the pair are releasing All the Good Times, a 10-song album of acoustic covers, via streaming services (with preorders open at gillianwelch.com for handmade CD and LP versions). Recorded at their home on a reel-to-reel, the album features songs by Bob Dylan, John Prine, Elizabeth Cotten, and more, as well as some traditional tunes with new arrangements.

“For reasons better discussed in the history books, in the Spring of 2020 Gillian and I dusted off an old tape machine and did some home recording,” they said on social media this morning. “Sometimes we bumped the microphone, sometimes the tape ran out, but in the end we captured performances of some songs we love. Five are first takes and five took a little more doing, but they all helped pass the time and held our interest in playback enough that we wanted to share them with you.”

Here’s the track list from All the Good Times, available now on the usual streaming services:

1. Oh Babe It Ain’t No Lie (Elizabeth Cotten)
2. Señor (Bob Dylan)
3. Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss (traditional, arranged by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
4. Hello In There (John Prine)
5. Poor Ellen Smith (traditional, arranged by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
6. All The Good Times Are Past And Gone (traditional, arranged by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)
7. Ginseng Sullivan (Norman Blake)
8. Abandoned Love (Bob Dylan)
9. Jackson (Jerry Leiber, Billy Wheeler)
10. Y’all Come (Arlie Duff)