Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, image via NPR

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have returned to NPR’s Music HQ in Washington, D.C. for their second Tiny Desk Concert. Fifteen years after they first joined behind Bob Boilen’s iconic desk, the acclaimed Americana duo graced the office stage with transportive treatments of three songs from their 10th studio album Woodland, as well as one closer to the roots of their nearly three-decade creative partnership.

Welch and Rawlings started up their new Tiny Desk performance with “Empty Trainload of Sky,” the soul-stirring, clear-eyed ballad of restlessness that opens their Grammy-winning 2024 project. As they moved through a matter-of-fact glance at hard luck and injustice on “Lawman” and the comforting, humorous and introspective Guy Clark tribute “Hashtag,” the artists conjured a wide-open plain of emotional nuance, swaying with the breeze between bleak resolve and spirits ablaze.

“Woodland is at the heart of everything we do, and has been for the last twenty-some years,” the creative partners said of their album’s inspiration last year. “The past four years were spent almost entirely within its walls, bringing it back to life after the 2020 tornado and making this record. The music is (songs are) a swirl of contradictions, emptiness, fullness, joy, grief, destruction, permanence. Now.”

Welch and Rawlings’ full acoustic strums and tender harmonies mingle with a closeness that can only come from years of thoughtful collaboration, and their personalities off the record show between songs as they reflect on their memories of a “tinier Tiny Desk” and a forgotten guitar tuner that NPR held on to for 15 years. To close the set, the duo looked back on Welch’s unforgettable 2001 recording “Revelator,” spurring a powerful, dynamic and deeply affecting outpouring of the musical and emotional experience they’ve earned in the decades since.

Watch Welch and Rawlings’ new Tiny Desk Concert below. For more information on the duo and their 2025 live itinerary, visit gillianwelch-davidrawlings.com/