In the second week of May, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings drove from Los Angeles to Nashvillle. The journey took 31 hours, and Welch filmed a small portion of it on her iPhone. The clip is framed by an open car window, and outside you can see the flooded Mississippi stretching away from the edge of the road to the horizon: a new inland sea for the beleaguered American South.
About five years ago, one of those serendipitous quirks of the music business made it seem, fleetingly, as if a bunch of underground folk musicians might find their way into the mainstream.
The breakthrough fourth album, reissued with a trove of demos...In 1986, REM’s elevation to umpty-million-selling ubiquity, dominant influence and stadium marquees appeared other than inevitable. The Georgia quartet had released, in breakneck succession, two critically adored albums (1983’s Murmur, 1984’s Reckoning) and a third (1985’s Fables Of The Reconstruction) which was a much more expansive but nonetheless nervy and flawed record.
