As the year comes to an end, we want to thank all the fans who’ve bought the new record, come to a show, or supported us in any fashion! We can’t wait to get back on the road again in a few weeks, and we are humbled by POOR DAVID’S ALMANACK being included in some of our favorite publications’ end-of-year lists. Here are a few of the inclusions:

“Nobody bends and breathes between notes quite like David Rawlings on guitar, and nobody harmonizes like David and his longtime partner Gillian Welch… In writing Poor David’s Almanack, David and Gillian set out to craft new folk songs that have the timeless quality of music passed down for generations.”
NPR Music “10 Albums That Made 2017 Brighter”

“…what remains crystal clear is the quality of the music. That’s especially true for standout track “Cumberland Gap,” a foot-stomping ode to one of the most treacherous mountain passes in Appalachia.”
Rolling Stone’s “25 Best Country Songs of 2017”

“Most of these originals sound like vintage folk classics, and his sibling-deep harmonies with Welch – who sings throughout – remain glorious.”
Rolling Stone’s “40 Best Country and Americana Albums of 2017″

“As ever, he plumbs the dark corners of American music and makes old sounds mean new things, with a deft picking style and a playful sense of structure and repetition.”
Stereogum’s “The 10 Best Country Albums Of 2017″

“Almanack is an endlessly inventive and lively collection of new folk tunes that sound old, as though Rawlings hadn’t written them but had found them in the back of some old antique store in the middle of nowhere. And yet, just like the old LP technology experiencing its own resurgence, these old-sounding songs somehow sound current, relevant, prescient”
The Bluegrass Situation’s “BGS CLASS OF 2017: ALBUMS”

As an end-of-year present, we also made a music video for Cumberland Gap! You can watch it right now on Apple Music.

WATCH: http://apple.co/cumberlandgap

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The POOR DAVID’S ALMANACK tour starts up again on Friday in Hartford, CT! We’re about to make the trek up to the northeast, and we love playlists, so we made some for you for your Thanksgiving travels. DAVID RAWLINGS ON RECORD is a near-complete list of songs Dave has appeared on whether singing, playing guitar, producing, or all three! Enjoy, and let us know which song you like best. 🙂

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“Q: You’re now under the name David Rawlings, rather than Dave Rawlings Machine. What was the decision behind that?

A: It was simplicity more than anything else. We’d come up with the Machine name a few years ago, but it just felt like it was time to write some songs by myself. It felt like more of a classic name to play under. When we first started out doing the Machine, I wasn’t as confident having my name on the album cover.”

More from a new interview with Dave in the new edition of the UK’s Acoustic Magazine, on stands today!

Dave and his new name (and old band) will be on the road in a month! Click below to buy tickets now:
http://www.davidrawlingsmusic.com/tour

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David Rawlings has announced an extensive Winter/Spring tour, in support of POOR DAVID’S ALMANACK, released August 11th on Acony Records. David, Gillian and the band will be headlining shows all across the United States. Special fan club presale begins Wednesday, September 27th at 10am local time for access to early-bird tickets. Just use the code “ALMANACK”. The presale only lasts for 24 hrs and can be accessed here, with all updated ticket links on the David Rawlings tour page. All shows go on sale Friday, September 29th.

11/24 – Hartford, CT at Infinity Hall
11/25 – Providence, RI at Columbus Theatre
11/27 – Portland, ME at State Theatre
11/28 – Northampton, MA at Academy of Music Theatre
11/29 – Boston, MA at Wilbur Theatre
12/1 – Burlington, VT at Higher Ground
12/2 – Albany, NY at The Egg
12/3 – Ithaca, NY at State Theatre
12/5 – New York, NY at Brooklyn Steel
12/6 – Washington, DC at Lincoln Theatre
12/7 – Philadelphia, PA at Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
12/8 – Richmond, VA at The National
12/9 – Charlottesville, VA at Jefferson Theater
1/17 – Chattanooga, TN at Tivoli Theater
1/18 – Athens, GA at Georgia Theatre
1/19 – Charlotte, NC at Neighborhood Theatre
1/20 – Saxapahaw, NC at Haw River Ballroom
1/21 – Saxapahaw, NC at Haw River Ballroom
1/23 – Nashville, TN at Ryman Auditorium
1/24 – Birmingham, AL at The Lyric Theatre
1/25 – Atlanta, GA at Variety Playhouse
1/26 – Asheville, NC at The Orange Peel
1/27 – Knoxville, TN at the Bijou Theatre
2/27 – Santa Cruz, CA at Rio Theatre
2/28 – Santa Rosa, CA at Luther Burbank Center for the Arts
3/1 – San Francisco, CA at The Fillmore
3/2 – Santa Barbara, CA at Lobero Theatre
3/3 – Los Angeles, CA at Ace Hotel
3/5 – Arcata, CA at John Van Duzer Theatre
3/7 – Grants Pass, OR at Rogue Theater
3/8 – Eugene, OR at McDonald Theatre
3/9 – Portland, OR at Roseland Theater
3/10 – Seattle, WA at Moore Theatre

*Fan Club presale begins Wednesday, September 27th at 10am local time. Use the code ALMANACK for access to early-bird tickets and lower fees.

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NO DEPRESSION FOUNDER GRANT ALDEN PENS PIECE ABOUT POOR DAVID’S ALMANACK

Being a Meditation on the Power and Glory of Folk Music Click here to read…

More Poor David’s Almanack In the Press

“…a sweetly engaging, impressively wide-ranging collection of American roots music.”

“An extraordinary folk guitarist with a sympathetic ear and a bell-like tone…”

“With its sway and moments of breezy virtuosity, ‘Poor David’s Almanack’ has
the feel of music made on a mountainside back porch for no other reason than the joy of doing so.”

“On Rawlings’ third LP under his own name, the question of whether his solo efforts are somehow
lesser than those he’s made with top-billed Gillian Welch becomes moot. Most of these 10 originals
sound like time-proven folk classics…”

“…an Americana record you can howl along to in the car until your heart feels replenished, to guitar
work that stands among the finest.”

“David Rawlings’ Poor David’s Almanack picks up where Nashville Obsolete left off — with that
gorgeous, spacious, sepia-toned timelessness and motion that Rawlings and his longtime partner,
Gillian Welch, conjure so well.”

“What’s so profoundly American about these songs are the way they often deploy humorous metaphor
and simple, child-like storytelling devices to convey deeper, darker truths.”

“Old-fashioned yet timeless and inextricably entwined, albums crafted by David Rawlings and his
partner-in-rhyme Gillian Welch have become the bedrock of 21st-century Americana music.”

Poor David’s Almanack LPs are now widely available. Visit your favorite record store or click below to order the new album now.

    Purchase Now    

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It is ironing day, one of the Kennedy years, and the tubes on the Fisher Hi-Fi smell like burning dust or outer space when they warm up. A handful of monaural LPs, the detritus of graduate school, is lovingly stacked to the side of the big speaker, chosen depending upon mood and the count of white shirts. And the audience, for the music will soothe and enchant the little boy, too, who sits at the center of the couch as quietly as a little boy can sit: Peggy Seeger, Jean Ritchie, Oscar Brand, Odetta, perhaps the Clancy Brothers, Cisco Houston because Woody’s voice is too rough, Ed McCurdy. “The Cat Came Back,” “Rye Whiskey,” and “Deportees.”

David Rawlings wasn’t born then, but Poor David’s Almanack would have played happily on that turntable, on his parents’ turntable. Over and over again, the little boy (either of us) smiling and kicking his heels into the couch.

The sound of fun being had. “So long, it’s been good to know you.”

As Squeeze sang, “Singles remind me of kisses, albums remind me of plans.”

What folk music was: deeply rooted songs with effortless melodies, the best lines repeated so often one cannot help but to sing along. Except that Rawlings and his confederates have access to a century’s accumulated tradition, technique, and technology, and all the loss which attends that.

The legacy of Harry Smith and Alan Lomax and John Work, and all the smart young people who found in that music a way to tell their own stories. To make a living.

\
Pause, please, to remember that Shakespeare stole his plots and wrote scenes to compete with the sounds of dogs fighting bears next door.

Which leaves out the other piece of it, the irreconcilable arguments about authenticity and cultural appropriation, for all those smart young people came principally from affluence and education and had not been obliged to walk the hills of Virginia selling fruit trees. Nor served time at Parchman Farm.

Does “Sixteen Tons” sound real, even if Merle Travis made the whole thing up? Is the keen longing, the hope and loneliness resplendent in the chorus of “Cumberland Gap” any less powerful because David Rawlings and Gillian Welch have never been obliged to harvest dinner with a flintlock? To say nothing of Woody Guthrie’s debt to the Carter Family, nor their debts.

Folk music, then, by which is meant all the fragments of songs one sings and whistles and remembers, irrespective who holds the copyright or whether the singer wore the glad rags of fame. A dense bramble, our music, largely untended, grown wild across an obscure patch of imagination about which nobody much cares. Weeds and hot house roses cross-pollinating. Its fruit is often picked and taken to market, and very occasionally it flowers.

Flowered into a full bouquet for one singular instant, when Little Richard found God and Buddy Holly plunged to earth and Chuck Berry did Mann Act time, the moment when earnest sweater folk came to Camelot. Such bland hope, and yet it was also the punk of its season, frat boys covering Tom Lehrer and pink Pete Seeger, borrowing from Tin Pan Alley, concealing authorship because true folk music had only vague, pre-literate sources. Love and theft.

Wait. “Sweater folk.” Do we undercut the singer or the audience with that epithet? Both. Artists are also performers who wear costumes, tailored so as to meet their audience’s expectations. And the audience, moved by the sing-a-long politics of those songs, really did rise up and change the world, for a time. The music — the art — they made popular created a commercial platform upon which Bob Dylan and John Prine and Joni Mitchell could stand.

Those silly songs really were about…something…that really was blowing in the wind.

And, so, back to this new Almanack singing.

Back to David Rawlings’ album in which the principal argument is not at all political — not at all — simply the artist’s complex meditation on the nature and process of creativity, on the illusion of originality, on the folk process itself. And his affection for a certain kind of song, long out of fashion. Poor David’s Almanack is either David Rawlings’ eighth album, counting the five he’s made with Gillian Welch, or his third, including two released by the Dave Rawlings Machine. Or his debut.

In any event it is the first public release of songs he did not co-write, a collaborative intimacy Nashville appointment books have given a bad name, but a rare skill nevertheless. (Gillian Welch did co-write half the album. There is no subtext, no drama.) “I didn’t do it by changing my process,” Rawlings says, “so much as I did it by finding little pieces of things in the world to co-write with.”

Little pieces of things.

Rawlings encountered his new songs while rooting among the ancient vines of folk music, the oral traditions of the blues and Bible stories, nonsense and tall tales. Fragments of things he could improvise around, improve, make new.

“It felt important in some ways to have written these things ourselves,” he says, “as opposed to playing Woody Guthrie’s version of a traditional song. This is the world of old folk music. These melodies have a strength in their simplicity. If you don’t want to sit and sing it around in circles ten or twenty times, it’s not doing the job.”

Yes, other people have set the devilish Child ballad behind “Yup” to music (the story apparently goes back to a sixth century Hindu text), recorded songs titled “Midnight Train,” or told the story behind the modern spiritual “Good God a Woman” (with its nod to Lead Belly). They simply didn’t sound like this, because that’s the folk process. And because David Rawlings is very, very good at what he does.

“Most of the good art I can find seems to be derived from something, more than I ever expected,” he says. “It all comes from somewhere, whether it’s intentional or unintentional. When I really evaluate art I like, I think, gee, the author added 30-some percent to that [source]. Maybe it’s the golden mean; you’re the little part. Maybe that’s what great art is.”

Almanack has all the simplicity and understatement of a debut, of an opening statement in which one can hear future echoes of all the complexities and nuances which might follow, except the reverse is true. It has taken twenty years of musical and recording knowledge to prune to this particular essence. During that time Rawlings and Welch have worked a comparatively narrow vein of Appalachian folk tradition, piling words and modern ambiguities upon familiar frames.

The frame beneath Almanack is different. To begin with, there is a dry, laconic northeastern humor lurking at its margins, betraying Rawlings’ Rhode Island origins (“Lindsey Button” sings like “Lindsey Burton,” just the edge of a burr there). And then, again, it is rich with participatory choruses your second grade teacher — the one with the big round glasses — would strum on her guitar. An audience of ghosts in sweaters, perhaps.

“All musicians have a much wider strike zone than their audience,” says Rawlings, having just conducted an eloquent disquisition on the musics of AC/DC, Black Sabbath, and the Pixies. ”Go listen to ‘9 to 5’ by Dolly Parton, and listen to Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass.’ ‘Heart of Glass’ happens two years earlier, and it’s a massive hit. And I think that’s completely intentional, but whether it is or not, it make no difference. There’s her source, there’s her new song.

“Woody Guthrie, the sun that Bob Dylan revolved around, realized that there wasn’t enough time in the world to write melodies for all the thoughts in his head,” says Rawlings. “A month doesn’t go by that I don’t bump into another source for a Bob Dylan song, which is a complete set of melody and chords that he wrote words to, and we all think of as a Bob Dylan song.”

Or, put more directly: All popular music is by definition folk music, even though purists and academics and copyright attorneys can argue the point endlessly.

It’s the songs, always. The glorious nonsense of “Money is the Meat in the Coconut” (Roger Miller, minus the little white pills), the toe-dragging love behind “Come On Over My House,” the sad peace underlying “Put ’em Up Solid.”

And the way they’re played, because only friends can play with such precise simplicity, with such glorious intimacy. They recorded in the familiar confines of East Nashville’s Woodland Sound Studios, the Machine (Brittany Haas, Paul Kowert, Willie Watson, and Gillian Welch), augmented by Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith (Dawes), with a handful of guests dropping by, because somebody’s got to play the saw.

“The album has got a certain color to it because it was made quickly,” Rawlings says. “It was a bit of an editing puzzle because there weren’t a lot of takes to choose from.” Luckily the songs announced themselves to be unfussy and durable things.

“In some ways,” Rawlings says, “this record feels to me like we’ve been living in this house for 20 years and we finally decided to open the back two rooms. We were leaving these rooms because we figured some other people would move in the back…expecting company, but nobody came.”
He pauses. Thinks some more. “Yes, this is folk music,” he says. “And we really have spent our lives doing it.”

All of which begs the central question, what it means to craft folk music…today? When almost (but not quite; far from) every ancestral song can be listened to online, when there can be no pretense of artistic innocence unless it be willful, when the habit of listening has become such a private headphone withdrawal and not a public celebration of transcendent joy.

It is a quest for a nonspecific kind of immortality. For a song or a phrase or a singular guitar line which survives past even the memory of your name.

It is the plain, simple truth of fun. Of human connection. Of shared emotion, even the hurting part.

It is the search for another song which makes a little boy sit on a couch quietly pounding his feet in time with a chorus he wants to hear over and over again. All his life.

It’s that.

Yup.

Grant Alden
Morehead, KY

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Poor David’s Almanack is out today! NPR hails the album as an “impressively wide-ranging collection of American roots music” and it can purchased on LP, CD, or digital here.

“With its sway and moments of breezy virtuosity, David Rawlings’ POOR DAVID’S ALMANACK has the feel of music made on a mountainside back porch for no other reason than the joy of doing so.”
– The Wall Street Journal

“This is soul music, down and dirty. He’s rediscovered America. I could listen to these songs a hundred times.”
– Garrison Keillor

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Track Listing
1. Midnight Train
2. Money Is The Meat In The Coconut
3. Cumberland Gap
4. Airplane
5. Lindsey Button
6. Come On Over My House
7. Guitar Man
8. Yup
9. Good God A Woman
10. Put ‘Em Up Solid

8/16 – Louisville, KY at Brown Theatre
8/17 – St. Louis, MO at The Sheldon Concert Hall – SOLD OUT
8/18 – Kansas City, MO at Folly Theater
8/20 – Lyons, CO at Rocky Mountain Folks Fest
8/23 – Minneapolis, MN at Pantages Theatre
8/24 – Madison, WI at Capitol Theater – Overture Center
8/25 – Chicago, IL at Thalia Hall
8/26 – Bloomington, IN at The Bluebird

*All shows are on sale now!

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