David Rawlings is a guitarist, songwriter, producer, and singer -- mostly in that order -- who plies his trade on a 1935 Epiphone Olympic, for which he's gained a devoted following for getting more action out of the small arch top guitar than most guitarists get out of modern electrics.
Rawlings first came to prominence in 1996 with the release of musical partner
Gillian Welch's debut album,
Revival. He and
Welch met while studying together at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. Together they crafted an old-timey blend of country, folk, and blues, built around
Rawlings' exceptional guitar picking and
Welch's haunting vocals. In 1998,
Rawlings and
Welch teamed up again on
Hell Among the Yearlings which, like their first effort, was produced by
T-Bone Burnett. In 2000,
Rawlings and
Welch joined
Ryan Adams on the latter's solo debut, Heartbreaker. The album opens with an argument between
Rawlings and
Adams concerning a
Morrissey song and is followed by the lively "To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)," which
Adams and
Rawlings wrote together. The two also co-wrote "Touch, Feel & Lose," which appears on
Adams' 2001 follow-up album,
Gold. That same year saw
Rawlings make his first foray into producing. He replaced
Burnett as producer for his and
Welch's third album,
Time (The Revelator) and produced their fourth, 2003's
Soul Journey, as well. In 2004, he produced
Old Crow Medicine Show's commercial debut O.C.M.S., and contributed his guitar work to the album's finale "Wagon Wheel." He even toured with the band to help promote the album in guitar and banjo player
Critter Fuqua's absence. Two years later,
Rawlings produced the band's follow-up, Big Iron World, sharing writing credits on nearly half of the album's songs. In 2007, he contributed to the
Bright Eyes album
Cassadaga, and the following year, he continued his relationship with
Old Crow Medicine Show, co-writing "Methamphetamine" with Ketch Secor.
Rawlings and
Welch began playing live shows with various musician friends in 2006 under the moniker
the David Rawlings Machine, featuring Rawlings as frontman for the first time. That experiment led to the 2009 debut under that moniker of
A Friend of a Friend, released on his and
Welch's Acony Records label. Over the next six years, he and
Welch toured but didn't record, though he worked on albums by
Damien Rice and
Willie Watson. In 2015, the
David Rawlings Machine re-emerged with the seven-track mini-album
Nashville Obsolete. Two years later the guitarist and
Welch took a crack studio band that included
Watson,
Paul Kowert,
Brittany Haas, Ketch Secor, and
Taylor and
Griffin Goldsmith of
Dawes into Nashville's Woodland Studio. Recording on analog tape, the week-long sessions were engineered by
Ken Scott and
Matt Andrews, and netted the ten-cut
Poor David's Almanack, released by Acony in August and immediately followed by a tour with
the David Rawlings Machine. ~ Chris Berggren