Revelator — Gillian Welch

#365Songs: February 19th

Like the land we live on, WhiteI’ve been thinking about perfect albums, those multilayered vessels that transport us into someone else’s conceptual soundtrack. The Cure’s Disintegration, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, REM’s Automatic for the People, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead, The Velvet Underground w/ Nico, Joni Michell’s Blue, Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, and of course I’m missing several more. These are albums that pop straight into my mind when I ponder what we’ve lost by abandoning the album structure in our listening habits.

So let’s talk about Gillian Welch’s Time (A Revelator). Released in 2001, and certainly just one of several of her exceptional albums, this one stuck with me most, for longest. I never just play one Gillian song. Her voice is a vacuum that sucks me in, and spins me in cycles where I don’t stop listening. A few years ago I listened to I Dream a Highway so many times I became the highway—it’s a wonder I haven’t memorized the lyrics, which are as strong as some of the finest literary poems.

You know that game where you have to name your desert island album, the one nobody should ever force someone to answer because that’s a cruel fucking question? I still don’t have an answer, but if Time (The Revelator) were the only album on the island when I got there, I’d be happy. It’s Americana perfection, with an appeal that blurs the boundaries between country, folk, and indie, and sits like a book of poems in your mind.

Revelator is a Biblical word, the wisdom-bearer who understands God’s final intentions, and in this context Gillian’s built us a sprawling landscape upon which we wait for the final reveal. When the album was released, she was quite clear that she wants us to FEEL it’s meaning, rather than study it: “There are a lot of words on this album, but they shouldn’t be read — just heard,” she said. “The meaning has to do with the way they sound.”

I like that, a lot. I think about in the context of literature: while I respect any form of consuming a book, I struggle with audio books unless read by the author because it establishes a layer that filters meaning through someone else’s interpretation, not ours.

Listen, feel, process. Repeat for 23 years and counting. This album’s cousin is a sprawling novel, how it welcomes you into a world you never leave no matter how long it’s been since you finished the last word.

Darling, remember
When you come to me
I’m the pretender
And not what I’m supposed to be
But who could know if I’m a traitor?
Time’s the revelator

In the title song, Revelator, we hear how seamlessly Gillian and partner Dave Rawlings play together, off of one another, layering their acoustic guitars and voices in crescendos and decrescendos, filling in the gaps between the poetry, pulling us into the rest of the album. There’s an undeniable melancholy here, a desperation, a desire for forgiveness, and yet there’s a suggestion that perhaps there’s a necessity to slow down, take it in, process the details as they happen, a prescient reminder that you can’t outrace time.

And in Gillian’s world, the revelator is in fact time itself, and what it reveals in the end is that a perfect album remains so for eternity.

They caught the katy
And left me a mule to ride
The fortune lady
Came along, she walked beside
But every word seemed to date her
Time’s the revelator
The revelator
Up in the morning
Up and on the ride
I drive into Corning
And all the spindles whine
And every day is getting straighter
Time’s the revelator
The revelator
Leaving the valley
Fucking out of sight
I’ll go back to Cali
Where I can sleep out every night
And watch the waves and move the fader
Time’s the revelator
The revelator
Queen of fakes and imitators
Time’s the revelator!