“It’s probably the first song I’ve ever written about writing songs.”Gillian Welch (1277)

“[In the song April the 14th, she describes the doomed heroism of some rock ’n’ roll bands she met on tour and combines that story with the spooky coincidence that Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the Titanic’s collision with the iceberg, and the greatest dust storm that America has ever known all occurred on the same date, April the 14th – Ed]. Well it starts with something I just observed. I was actually playing a gig in Eugene, Oregon at this funny little rock ’n’ roll club called John Henry’s – so another folk myth gets drawn in – and I played this show, it was kind of an early show and when my partner, David, and I got done there was a five band punk show setting up. Five bands were going to play between 9pm and 2am and it was a $2 cover charge for the entire night which meant each guy in each band was probably going home with about $3. It was about as realistic a rock ’n’ roll scene as you could get.”Gillian Welch (1277)

“I remember exactly where I was and what was going on. It was when Napster was starting to decimate the traditional recording industry dynamic, the viability of making your livelihood [from] your art. I had read some piece of news that had to do with Napster — that was the catalyst. I don’t want to pin it down and say the song was about Napster, it wasn’t. It’s about feeling like my personal creative independence was threatened. What I realized over the course of writing the song was that the power I retained was the threat of withholding. I hate those people who get on their high horse and say, “Art is pure. Do it anyway.” Of course I’m going to do it anyway, you jackass. But I’m not going to do it outside of my house. This is what I do. It’s what I’ve done since I was seven years old. But from the time I was seven until I was 18, I only performed my songs in my bedroom. It was only once I realized that I was going to have to get a job that I started to do it professionally. There were a number of songs I can remember crying while working on them, and that was the case with this one. I really thought that we were going through enough of a sea change that I felt inconsolable. I was like, “I can’t believe it. I got to this point. I’m a professional musician, and now I’m not going to be.” I really felt that threatened.”Gillian Welch (1302)

[Gillian] “That’s a song that I started literally the morning I woke up and saw #GuyClark trending and I thought oh no this is a terrible way to find out that your friend is gone.”

[David] “That song really taps into the community that there is among singer songwriters and musicians and people who know they’re doing it because they love it. You make as good of a living as you can, but you’re not going to stop; sometimes a lot of the support that you find is just from other people who have done it the same way.”

[Gillian] “There’s also a line in there when you [David – Ed] say “Community” I do feel it connects to other writers and other creative people like, there’s a line about “the years roll out and the doubt rolls in” and I remember one time talking to Garrison Keeler about writing and I must have been in a frustrated moment which happens occasionally and he said, “well, you know, it just gets harder”.”

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings (1334)

[David] “There’s so much sort of loss there. That song just touches a lot of everything that was happening [the damage to their Woodland Studios caused by a tornado in 2020 – Ed].”

[Gillian] “It certainly wasn’t just a breakup. In fact, so much was gone. So much that we had, had disappeared. It was kind of more macro. I started the song with the chorus and the ‘what we had’ – that’s where it came from, and I kind of couldn’t believe that that song didn’t exist already and it was just the sound of those words. It really blindsided me and so many people that tremendous sense of you know you don’t miss your water till your well runs dry. Just never saw it coming just had no idea that you know the world was just going to go woop.”

[David] “I think about a time in 2019. I had decided that what I was going to do was rewind a pickup for an electrical lap steel guitar – by hand – 10,000 winds of a copper thing, by myself like that’s where my mind was in 2019. I had enough time at one minute to go, “I guess this is the moment where I’m going to play around with this for a week or two”. When I think back on that and what I’ve done for the past 5 years I’m like how could that have been real? I don’t have time to brush my teeth you know for the past five years.”Gillian Welch & David Rawlings (1334)

[Gillian] “That particular idea had sort of been cooking for a while. We knew it was going to be from the point of view of the woman who knew her man was going to get it from the lawman. There’s this inevitability and it’s such a weird temporal setting.”

[David] “It felt societal and it felt like it connected to a lot of… we all know people in our lives who, you look at them, and you know what path they’re heading down and just thinking of that doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t… you know there’s things that you know that you can’t stop.”

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings (1334)

[Gillian] “I just thought that was a beautiful phrase. I heard it in an old Spiritual who was talking about heaven and how it was all going to be good up there, it was all going to be Howdy Howdy, never goodbye.”

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings (1334)