In melodius duets
by Michael J. Kramer
click to enlarge
Born closer to the Hills of Beverly than Appalachia (her parents were writers for the Carol Burnett Show), Gillian Welch's (pictured) folksy music transports a listener to the threshold of present and past, a musical dream-state Bob Dylan referred to in a recent album title as Time Out of Mind. Performing with her partner and producer, the wicked guitar-picker David Rawlings, Welch's gorgeous country ballads and up-tempo jaunts mingle references to ancient country or blues songs with personal narratives of a postmodern life spent whisking through airports and cities. It's the strange mixture of displacement and discovery that makes the music so good--you find yourself in a place where America makes sense for a second, where its distant oldness and digital newness seem to line up for a moment in one of Welch and Rawlings' gorgeous harmony duets. This is the same kind of place Billy Bragg and Wilco got to when they updated Woody Guthrie's lyrics; it's the place Dylan seeks out now in his Love and Theft, riverboat-gambler persona; it's the place critic Greil Marcus wrote about as America's "invisible republic," that "old, weird America" whose strange echoes always hauntingly reappear: comforting, confronting, soothing, or terrifying us with their history. It's the place Welch perhaps refers to in a song's double title, "Wayside/Back in Time," on her new CD, Soul Journey. One may go "Back in Time," but this is only a "Wayside" from which we always glance backward, as if we were on the back of the caboose of a train, always hurtling forward down the tracks.
8 p.m. Tickets for the show are $21, advance purchase. For more information, call 560-3040 or visit www.carolinatheatre.org.
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