How Gillian Welch and David Rawlings Do It

For 30 years now, Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings have been making music together. Their country-folk songs, delivered in beautiful two-part harmony and often featuring Rawlings’ intricate guitar work, are steeped with a century’s worth of American tradition. But the songwriters also chronicle contemporary uncertainty with a gimlet eye: “Everything Is Free” remains the best song ever made about forging a music career in the internet era, and their “Hard Times” speaks to every American who’s battling it out with 21^st-century economic trouble, even as it embraces the spirit and language of the Great Depression to beautiful effect.