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Buy A Friend of a Friend here!

Join us for a special in-store performance with guitarist, producer, singer-songwriter Dave Rawlings Machine (best known for his work with Gillian Welch and Old Crow Medicine Show) in celebration of his first record A Friend of a Friend (out now on Acony Records).  

Also appearing at the Troubadour on February 4, 8pm and at Amoeba San Francisco on February 9 at 5:30pm.

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A Friend of a Friend is the first record by Dave Rawlings, the guitarist, producer, singer, and songwriter best known for his work with Gillian Welch and Old Crow Medicine Show.  These long time compatriots join Rawlings on this record beside newer friends Benmont Tench from the Heartbreakers, Karl Himmel, and Nate Walcott of Bright Eyes.  The notion of recording as Dave Rawlings Machine began in 2007.  “I had a few older songs that I had written with other artists that I wanted to record myself.  Then the last year or so Gillian and I spent a good deal of time in Los Angeles, hanging out with a new group of musicians and songwriters.  This inspired a number of songs that seemed to complete the picture.  So we started recording.  It was as much of a surprise to me as it was to anybody.”

Of the nine songs on the playlist, Rawlings wrote seven.  The other two are “The Monkey and the Engineer,” a country blues by Jesse Fuller, who died in 1976, and a medley consisting of “Method Acting,” by Conor Oberst, and “Cortez the Killer,” by Neil Young.  Rawlings learned “Method Acting” two years ago while playing guitar on a Bright Eyes tour.  “I played ‘Method Acting’ every night on that tour,” Rawlings says, “and it sort of sank into my awareness in a very deep way.  ‘Cortez the Killer’ is a song I heard long before I ever played guitar and it changed the way I heard music."

A Friend of a Friend has more lavish arrangements than songs from the Gillian Welch catalog typically do.  They are more boisterous, but they are built on the same careful spine that Welch songs are.  Rawlings’s sly and succinct guitar playing is embedded within ensemble play as opposed to carrying the bulk of the arrangement.  The songs are exuberant, sturdy, and carefully constructed, but they also reverberate poetically.  The music on A Friend of a Friend is cousin to the deftly modern and haunting music that Welch and Rawlings are known for, but it has here been expanded; the crowd is larger, the party more robust, but the room is the same room.