Close Encounters Of The Transcendental Kind

On Rolling With Dave Rawlings & How Far Away From Home Are We Now?

‘I don’t know what tomorrow brings, its full of such possibilities…’*

The cool thing about Hollywood, for all its self consciousness and hustle and quinoa is that sometimes astonishing things that somehow feel ordinary at the time, can and do occur out of the blue.

Some years ago, on the 4th July, we were living in LA and my husband’s niece Dess was coming over to hang out and eat some food with us, and asked if she could bring her friend with her. Then she was running late and called to ask if her friend could come over first. Of course, we said. Fabi arrived, we got chatting and hit it off right away and cracked open a bottle of something and put on some vibes. Eventually Dess turned up, with another friend. Our little party started to get cooking.

Fabi asked if it would be ok if her friend Dave, a musician from out of town, came over as well. Sure, we said, the more the merrier!

Then Dave Rawlings turned up. I knew who he was, knew some of his work and loved it, but I had somehow missed out on really digging in to most of it. We all gathered together on our little ramshackle covered patio that featured a couple of half broken thrift store chairs and a bunch of cushions, with our drinks and ashtrays and cheese and dips etc, and chatted away as we looked out onto our funny little hard scrabble dirt garden that somehow produced an insane amount of extremely tall roses.

I even wrote a song inspired by this called ‘The Tallest Rose In Los Angeles’.

There was this guitar I had, just leaning against the patio wall. Like most everything we owned, it was a bit dodgy. I had found it in a gigantic thrift store in Griffin, Georgia, when I put out a call to the Universe that I really needed to get myself a geet. Thank you Universe. The neck of this old looking guitar was sticking out from where it was buried under a pile of discarded vacuum cleaners and coat hangers and Bibles and god knows what, and I immediately had a sense that there was something special about it. I carefully dug it out. There was no label on it but it looked old and cool, and like something a bluesman would play. I was sold, especially when I saw the price tag was $4.94. It was banged up and needed some love and sounded like shit but I knew it had potential. I was pretty sure it was grateful to be rescued, and that we were going to be friends. When I got it home I tried identifying it online and decided it was probably a Stella Harmony guitar, which were sold cheap for learners from the 1930s but were actually pretty good. I went and recorded this EP on it soon after in Nashville. If you listen you’ll see it sounds more like a weird banjo than a guitar.

Anyway, it was not one of those guitars that you could pick up and just strum gently away and it would sound pretty. Unless, of course, your name was Dave Rawlings.

Within two minutes of sitting down, Dave picked it up and and started thumbing it and the most mesmerisingly beautiful sounds I may have ever heard started emerging from it. Our animated conversations slowly dried up as everyone’s heads turned towards the source of the sound. I turned off the canned music floating out of the speaker and whatever the beautiful song Dave was playing morphed into ‘Cortez The Killer’. One of my favourites! I somehow did not know about this incredible version at this time. Dess did (her Daddy raised her right) and she sang along like an angel.

Dave seemed to play it endlessly, like time turned in on itself… I feel like he must have played that song for thirty perfect minutes that turned the air blue and transcendental. When he finished we all immediately begged him to play it again, or something else, or anything. The man was a magician and we wanted to see all of his tricks. He grinned and obliged, chill as fuck, like his sole purpose in life was to make these sounds.

I don’t recall him ever pausing to take a sip of his wine or visit the bathroom or dip a chip. The whole night went on this way, although with all the drinks and the fireworks in the distance it got blurrier and blurrier and we all started singing along and occasionally one or other of us would attempt to play a song and then just pass the guitar back to Dave to wring more things from it.

And then he played something that sounded like a song I’d been working on in my head and on scraps of paper called ‘How Far Away From Home Are We Now?’ so I went and got my scribbled notes and some bits of percussion laying around and my kid’s junior plastic guitar we started messing about with the song, with everyone throwing in lines and rhymes and suggestions and singing along with great gusto in the chorusses and before too long it was already sounding like a classic. That’s when you know you’ve caught a good one!

I’d misplaced my phone long ago so Fabi was taking photos and recording it on her phone for posterity so I didn’t bother writing anything down. I feel like we played that song until the sun started coming up round 5am and we decided it was time to say bleary eyed goodbyes. Fabi promised to send me the audio recording of the song later so I could transcribe it.

This is the only photograph I got, when I finally found my phone after everyone had left.

The morning after the night before

Later that day/night Dave came back to pick up a painting my husband gave him, and we started up carousing again. My husband is a very persuasive man and he told Dave he’d been thinking about that song he played last night…. something about hearing? …. and could he play it again. So Dave did, just leant against the garage bench and played and sung ‘I Hear Them All’ like it was our own private concert. The crowd (us) went wild and begged for more. Play it again Dave! So he did. He slow grinned and played it for us three times in a row, each time as perfect as before. He declined a request for a fourth. Not much later he drove off into the night, his painting in the back seat.

The next morning, I picked up the guitar he’d wrung those tremulous divine tones from, sure he’d somehow fixed it and I would be able to play it like magic now too but it still sounded like a dying frog in my fingers.

That afternoon, Fabi told us her phone had spat the dummy and couldn’t be resurrected and the audio recording of our song and the photos were lost to time and memory, of which sadly there was little.

But just knowing this night happened, fills me with a kind of secret good feeling. Like a magic trick you can’t believe, but you know what you saw with your own eyes. And it fills you with a little piece of wonder.

Thank you friends for the time we shared

Your love stays with me like sunlight and air

And though I truly wish I could keep hanging around here

My joy is covering me

Soon I will disappear

(*Method Acting by Dave Rawlings Machine)

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I remembered this night and was compelled to write about it as I was listening to the beautiful new album by Gillian Welch & Dave Rawlings Woodland Studios …. speaking of new albums (see what I did there?such a smooth segue!), my new record Transatlantic Light, recorded with my incredible musical compadres The Great Beyond, is out September 20!

If you go follow me on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Tidal or wherever you listen, it will turn up in your new music as soon as it’s released. I don’t have any kind of PR machine, it’s just little ol’ me trying to spread the word so I am extra appreciative of any listening support you are able to give. Thank you!

You can preorder it here on Bandcamp and get it early on September 18th.

Or you can pre-order here it on beautiful clear pink limited edition vinyl with liner notes by

Will Hermes

and get it even earlier on September 13th!

If you are reading this in Australia, may I just remind you it’s Father’s Day and Dads love me!

Also my dad Peter Head contributes gorgeous Hammond organ and honky tonk piano to this album. And Robyn Hitchcock happened to drop by to see his buddy Ken while we were recording and sung backing vocals with Sam! The coolest of cool dudes! You can also pre-order his new album and get his new book 1967:How I Got There & Why I Never Left here (this would also be an excellent Father’s Day gift for Australian fathers, who are celebrated on a different day to other fathers around the world, cos we like to do things our own way).

And if you are reading this in Sydney, Australia please come along for our special stripped back instore performance at Impressed Records headquarters (93 Bourke St, Woolloomooloo) to celebrate the arrival of Transatlantic Light on Friday 13th September. Doors at 6pm.

We won’t be touring this album until next year so this will be the only chance to hear it live for now. If you do come along, please introduce yourself! I’d love to meet my Substack friends in real life.

May you have a transcendental weekend!

Lo x