Track Listing

1. Caleb Meyer
2. Good Til Now
3. The Devil Had a Hold of Me
4. My Morphine
5. One Morning
6. Miner's Refrain
7. Honey Now
8. I'm Not Afraid to Die
9. Rock of Ages
10. Whiskey Girl
11. Winter's Come and Gone

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5717 in Music
• Released on: 2001-06-12
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Original recording reissued
• Dimensions: .20 pounds

Album Description
Second album from the melancholic folk revivalist from 1998. Produced by T. Bone Burnett. Acony Records.

Amazon.com's Best of 1998
A much more quietly celebrated CD than her debut, Gillian Welch's sophomore effort assured fans of old-timey country folk that she was salt of the earth. Her songs speak with both plaintive yearning and a seasoned storyteller's moxie, urged on by her and David Rawlings's economical guitar picking and strumming. Welch's vocal timbre bears ideally twangy power, giving her a constantly strong vault into her similarly creative tales, which help place this CD clearly in the realm of the exceptional. -- Andrew Bartlett

Amazon.com
On her remarkable debut, Revival, Gillian Welch sang of men and women who were intimately tied to others, even as they mourned dead children or lost homes. Hell Among the Yearlings finds Welch in even darker territory. In this world, loss can't be assuaged by human connection because there is none: morphine junkies, dying hobos, and alienated workers stand utterly alone in a sparse landscape where hope comes, if at all, in merely surviving. For example, the woman who kills her rapist or the singer who unconvincingly declares her troubles have flown because "Winter's Come and Gone." Appropriately, Welch's stunning voice goes it alone, surrounded by little more than her own banjo and the spare old- time and country-blues guitar of partner David Rawlings. --David Cantwell

Customer Reviews

One of the best artists in years; better than "Revival"
Being somewhat snobby when it comes to music, it is a rare treat to find a real artist out there that can really speak to me. Gillian Welch is one of few that have struck me so deeply.

As great as "Revival" is, I think this album is even better. The thing I like the most about it is its consistent theme of melancholy and woe; yet it is completely unpretentious and genuinely moving. The first album "Revival" (aptly named) embraces different moods (which is a great thing in itself), but this album absolutely grabs me and doesn't let go.

For me, the absolute standouts are (although EVERY track is very strong--no throwaways here!) are "My Morphine", "Miner's Refrain", "I'm Not Afraid To Die", "Caleb Meyer", "Rock Of Ages", and "Whiskey Girl" (I know, that's most of them). The purity of her vocals, and the absolute perfection of the precise harmony vocals, coupled with the crisp playing (pretty much just acoustic guitar and banjo, except for "Honey Now") and clear, bare bones production (proving that less is more when it comes to production), make for one of the best albums I've heard in years (believe me, that's really saying something!).

Thank you, Gillian, for this gift. We need artists like you. BADLY!! You give me hope!

Get this and/or "Revival". She is amazing. "The real thing".

Worth the wait
As every review you're likely to read will tell you, the subject matter of these songs is as dark as the sepia tones on the album's cover photo. But there is a danger of making too much of that and of not really getting it in right perspective.

We can compare Welch and her partner David Rawlings with The Handsome Family, whose _Through the Trees_ also deals with dark material. The Handsome Family uses melodies and instrumentation that sound traditional, but combines these with surreal prose poetry whose images are far from the ones the melodies lead you to expect. The result is music that subverts the form it uses and leaves the listener profoundly disoriented. This is neither better nor worse than what Welch does, but the emotional effect is very different. Listening to The Handsome Family can be viscerally disturbing; I can only do it in small doses. Welch's subject matter is depressing, but that doesn't describe the result. The musical form and the poetry are matc! hed. A song like "One Morning" doesn't just sound like an Appalachian ballad; it could very well be one. That means that even though the images are chilling, we are permitted to keep some distance.

Even though Welch's more traditional approach won't give you vertigo, it would be a mistake to think that there's nothing original here, or that the images won't stick with you. "Morphine" is a case in point. The singer addresses the drug as a lover turned cruel and the music conjures up a sense of watching longings fade in a haze. After a few listenings, you feel as though the ghost of this lost junkie has brushed you by. That sort of musical onomatopoeia is part of what makes a song like "Whiskey Girl" work. The imagery here is more elusive: Nowhere Man and the Whiskey Girl head off for the underworld. This is one of the few songs with more than acoustic guitar or banjo as accompaniment; Rawlings uses an electric guitar and producer T-Bone Burnett p! lays piano and organ. The remarkably restrained result is a! sense of discovering that hell is a place of lethargy and low moans.

For whatever reason, Gillian Welch has chosen to work in a world of shadows. But these shadows imply the presence of a light that reflects in surprising ways off of the subjects of these 11 beautifully-wrought songs. This album is a worthy follow-up to _Revival_, and confirms the sense that many of us had that Gillian Welch is an artist of rare and remarkable talent.

New Yorker Profile
There is a great profile of Welch and Rawlings in the New Yorker titled "The Ghostly Ones". Google "Gillian Welch" "New Yorker".