Gillian Welch Returns to the Vaults for ‘Boots No. 2’

Singer-songwriter Gillian Welch has announced the upcoming release of Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs via Acony Records, via the independent record label she and partner David Rawlings founded in 2001.

It arrives July 31.

Taken from a set of home demos and reel-to-reel recordings, the collection marks the second release of archival music from the vault of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.  Spread over three volumes and produced by David Rawlings, the 48-song collection was recorded between the making of Time (The Revelator) and Soul Journey.

Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs, Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 will follow in the coming months.

The first two songs from the collection, the haunting ballad “Strange Isabella” and the twangy romp “Mighty Good Book,” have been issued as singles.  

“We stashed these recordings away years ago,” says the duo in a press release. “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.”

“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. 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.

Welch and 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.

“In the spring of 2020, Gillian and I dusted off an old tape machine and did some home recording,” says Rawlings. “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. We sincerely hope that you enjoy [them].”

Photo by David Gahr