Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs Vol. 2 and 3 to follow in the next few months
On July 31, 2020, Gillian Welch released Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs, Vol. 1 via Acony Records, the independent record label she and partner David Rawlings founded in 2001. Vol. 1 is the first installation of a three-part collection which contains songs unearthed from a cache of home demos and reel-to-reel recordings. This remarkable 48 song collection, produced by David Rawlings, was recorded between the making of Time (The Revelator) and Soul Journey. Said the duo about the release, “We stashed these recordings away years ago. Their shortcomings, real or imagined, technical or compositional, no longer seem bothersome today. Hearing them now is like seeing snapshots that captured moments the more formal portraits missed. So here we are hurrying them for release before the next tornado blows the whole shoebox away.” Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs, Vol. 1 is available digitally now here, with Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 following in the coming months.
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings both spoke to Rolling Stone about the collection, it’s inspiration, as well as their recently released cover collection, All The Good Times. In the interview, Welch reveals: “Having all the tapes almost destroyed really makes you think. All of our masters were in the tape vaults at Woodland, and when the roof got peeled off like a sardine can and then it rained for four hours and then the ceilings all collapsed, basically everything we have was almost destroyed. … It made us think about our whole archive. It’s one thing to know in your mind that you have these tapes, and it’s another thing to run through the dark with them in your arms, rescuing them from destruction. Once we rescued them at great peril, you think, “Why did I rescue this?” And then you find yourself thinking, “Well, I guess because it means something.” Read the interview here.
“These songs disorient you in time because Gillian Welch blends past and present in a way that makes the past, present.” Jedediah Purdy writes in the album’s liner notes. “To listen through Boots 2 is to feel you have gotten thoroughly lost, and maybe drunk or worse, in a landscape of strangers. It is also to feel that, wandering through that landscape, you might actually never have left your house, and it might not matter whether you did or not, since you have become a stranger to yourself. It is like going through weeks when the sun refuses to shine, or maybe your body just refused to go out and meet it, because the sun had become hateful to you. Saying that it feels this way — which it does — risks making this music sound like a bummer. It is not. It is a trip. It is also a joy.” He further expounds, “by making art of an experience that, in life, is usually fraught with inarticulacy and bewilderment, these songs make obscurity vivid, strangeness intimate, dissolution into something solid and alive. Music like this makes broken existence fleetingly whole.”
Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs comes after 2016’s Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg, a double album of unreleased outtakes, alternate versions, and demos from the making of the seminal 1996 debut album. Pitchfork said of the initial collection, “witnessing gradual transformation can be revelatory, and several early takes lay bare the process of refining Gillian Welch into “Gillian Welch” with staggering clarity,” and NPR Music adds, “the whole thing serves as a tremendous reminder of how and why this partnership came to matter so much.”
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings recently released All The Good Times, a new album of ten acoustic covers recorded at home on a reel-to-reel. The album contains songs by Bob Dylan, John Prine, Elizabeth Cotten, and Norman Blake, as well as new arrangements of traditional songs. The album is available on all formats here.
Boots No. 2 :The Lost Songs Vol. 1 Tracklisting:
1. Johnny Dear
2. First Place Ribbon
3. Give That Man A Road
4. Mighty Good Book
5. Chinatown
6. Fly Down
7. Shotgun Song
8. Apalachicola
9. Strange Isabella
10. Little Luli
11. Valley of Tears
12. Blind On The Inside
13.Back Turn And Swing
14. Roll On
15.Honey Baby
16. Here Come The News
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Source: Press Release
