Quote:It Must Have Been The Roses: Gillian Welch and David Rawlings on Their Grateful Dead Devotion and Acoustic Reckoning Tour
Dean Budnick on April 3, 2026 


Photo: Alyssa Gafkjen
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The Relix Channel

“It’s a big old mountain that I’ve been contemplating for something like 40 years. I’m almost speechless,” Gillian Welch acknowledges, just before she and David Rawlings will take to the road for a series of shows in which they will set their sights on the Grateful Dead’s colossal catalog. In particular, the pair will focus on Reckoning, the Dead’s double album that was released 45 years ago this week. The sixteen tracks on Reckoning are drawn from the group’s fall 1980 performances at The Warfield in San Francisco, then New York’s Radio City Music Hall. During those shows, the group opened with an acoustic set, blending originals such as “Ripple,” “Bird Song,” “Cassidy,” “China Doll,” and “To Lay Me Down” with familiar covers like “Jack-A-Roe,” “Been All Around This World,” “The Race Is On” and “Dark Hollow.”
This material will be at the heart of “Gillian Welch & David Rawlings Play Grateful Dead Acoustic Reckoning,” which kicks off with two nights at Brooklyn Bowl Nashville on April 3 and 4. Despite the tour’s moniker, the two won’t be interpreting the album from start to finish and plan on adding additional tunes. They’ve previously delved into the Dead catalog on a few occasions, via takes on “China Doll” and “Brokedown Palace,” while Jesse Fuller’s “Monkey and the Engineer” is a Reckoning track that also appears on the 2009 Dave Rawlings Machine album A Friend of a Friend.
Rawlings echoes Welch’s metaphor in noting, “The way I’ve been describing it is that the music is a mountain and we’re at base camp. We’re trying to see if we can get a few steps up there towards the height that they were able to achieve.”
Welch shares her perspective on the music, as she muses, “It’s interesting because I don’t listen to too many people covering the Dead. I like the Dead so much that I’m not very well acquainted with other people doing Dead songs. But let me just say, I’m kind of surprised when I hear people doing them. I think I’m kind of a freak but I have this other impression of what the Dead sounds like, and they’re really heavy to me. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Not that it’s dour or dark though, because I hear this continuous pushing against that, this continuous attempt to transcend. I hear the Dead as ecstatic. One of the things that speaks to me about their music is trying to get lost in the moment. It’s shocking how often that works.”
Rawlings adds, “As a band, the Dead were able to deconstruct music. Sometimes there were things you wanted that they would take away, like a melody or tonality or the rhythm. Sometimes they would go all the way into space where they’ve taken all the nutritional value out of it. You’ve lost the pulse of the music, you’ve lost the tonality and you’re just out there. Then when it comes back, you have this feeling like someone is showing you music for the very first time.”
WITH OUR DREAMS ENTWINED TOGETHER
GILLIAN WELCH: I discovered the Dead when I was 18. I’d heard them before but that’s when I went to my first show at San Francisco Civic. That’s when it really started.
“Black Peter” is the first song that really went all the way in, and it was kind of perfect for me. I grew up with folk music, and I heard this song that was so clearly coming out of the folk tradition but had its own narrative. That really spoke to me, and you could kind of say that’s what I’ve done my whole career.
Some singers have a voice like a key that just fits perfectly in your brain and your being. From the very first time I ever heard Jerry, that happened. He just completely clicked, and it was like all access to the complete inside of my head.  Then I just couldn’t get enough. There were phrases and words and whole songs I knew from growing up listening to all these old time and folk music songs, and here they were alive in this new incarnation right in front of me. It was just extraordinary.
I felt an instant sense of community and place, and it was so artistically exciting to feel like all this music that I’d grown up with was so alive and being invented in front of me right at that moment. It was very important for me that I was able to see them live and not just experience them on recordings.
It’s a wonder of wonders that there are so many recordings of them, though. It’s a truly remarkable thing. I also know that I can read into all those live recordings and imagine what the show was like. It’s very interesting to think about that.
DAVID RAWLINGS:  For a few years I’ve been sneaking songs into our shows here and there. We also play some stuff at soundcheck for fun because I really enjoy the music.
I think it’s interesting to put that music into our little diorama. I’m hoping that we will be a diorama of the Dead where you see it and go, “Oh yeah, it looks like the Dead when you get up close to it. ” It’s much smaller and it’s different, but it’s lifelike.
I never thought we would do something this expansive with any other kind of music. It’s not that I wouldn’t want to do it, I just didn’t think anyone would tolerate it.
At first, Pete Shapiro and Jay Sweet mentioned doing something where we would be the hosts and a lot of people would come do stuff. But I as thought about it, I realized that if we were going to do this, I wanted to do it all ourselves. I mean, that’s the joy of it. I want to dig in and try to bring what we can to this music and let this music bring what it can to us. It’s an incredible body of work and there’s a lot in there to be learned.
We were planning on it last year and had started making plans. Then, of course, Bobby passed and it got a little heavier after that with the feeling that there are a lot of people who are contemplating this legacy at this moment. That’s something we didn’t expect was going to be happening. We thought we were going to be running out there and just trying to do the best job we could.
It’s funny, I was just having a conversation with someone who’s a huge music fan, but has never been a big Dead fan, although he’s an older guy and kind of lived through it all. I was explaining some of the things that make what they do live so special and the things that if you haven’t been exposed to a lot of the great shows, you really wouldn’t have known.
I missed a lot of this as a young person because I heard the radio songs, which were fine, along with some of the live stuff that was more electric and fusion-y. They had gone in a direction that I wasn’t as enamored with at the specific moment because I was getting into acoustic music and old time music. Then when I discovered the Reckoning album—before I would hear other live shows that I’d come to love—it really opened doors in my mind. I thought Reckoning was fantastic, and I spent a lot of time with it.
WHEEL TO THE STORM AND FLY
GW: The first thing that Dave and I did as we were contemplating this, was we talked about songs that we couldn’t imagine leaving out. Our band is acoustic, so some stuff is going to be difficult for us, but we really are coming at this tour from a song perspective and from the Reckoning perspective. Those are the two columns. A bunch of people have asked if we’re just going to play the record down, and no, we’re not going to do that. It’s not exactly an album tour per se. We’re going to try to construct a Grateful Dead show.
I won’t speak for Dave, but I’ve been listening to beloved versions of these songs and not worrying if they’re electric or acoustic. Then I’ve been trying to get the feeling and the cornerstones of the figures and the rhythms. I’m trying to metabolize those into my acoustic guitar parts.
I’m going to be trying to make an impression of the whole rhythm of what’s happening in what I do because I’m the rhythm guitar player. So I’m going to try to be that little riff the organ normally does, or some little kick that Kreutzmann normally does, or some little thing that Bobby normally does. I’m trying to be evocative of those. That’s my gig.
DR: We wanted to focus on stuff that they had done acoustic, but the truth is you have to let the music guide you through it. You have to try stuff and see if you’re bringing what the song needs to the table. That’s the hard part.
What we’re going to try to do—and I won’t give too much of it away—is we’re going to try to do some of these transitions that they did a lot more when they were electric. Something the Dead didn’t really do on Reckoning and didn’t really do acoustic is get as spacious and move from song to song. That’s something I think we do, as we tend to use our instruments to get this landscape or this space.
We have a capacity to merge a little bit of what the Dead did electric into an acoustic realm, more so than they did because they didn’t need to do it. When they were playing their acoustic set in front of their electric set, there was no need for them to wonder if they could transition into “Wharf Rat.” They didn’t need to worry about that because they could just pick up their electric instruments and do it 20 minutes later. But I can’t do that. So I might want to be playing something and transition into “Wharf Rat” because I fucking love “Wharf Rat.”
IF MY WORDS DID GLOW
GW: I identify tremendously with where Robert Hunter was coming from. I think to some degree I’m coming from the same place, which is Beat language and freedom in all ways—freedom of action and freedom of thought—combined with all the weird Americana of old time and mountain and country and blues.
That’s kind of where Dave and I are coming from. What’s so interesting about diving into the Dead’s catalog for us is I feel very comfortable there.
DR: Robert Hunter was looking at this great breadth of Americana material along with The Canterbury Tales and other stuff. He had a world that he was creating with this kind of mystical, but deeply American symbolisms and callbacks to different things. Then you have the Dead, and they’re all looking at American music and cherry picking “Sing Me Back Home” and the majesty of Chuck Berry songs and “Not Fade Away” and the blues with Pipgen. They’re looking at this huge breadth of American music, and it’s so interesting that as a writer, Robert Hunter was doing the exact same thing, and they’re combining all of it. 
Our first record came out in the mid ’90s after Jerry had passed, and being the fan I was, I remember thinking that he was one of the people who would have heard what we were doing and completely understood where we were coming from. I believed that he would have recognized why we loved that music and why as a young person I could have heard “I’m just here to get my baby out of jail” sung on a 78 and think, “Man, there’s something in there that I want to dive into further.”
As an improviser myself, there are certain people who improvise on a guitar that I really love. Jerry is on that real short list and always was, along with Neil Young and Willie Nelson. The more I’ve listened to shows and the deeper I’ve gone, it’s pretty staggering the way he could just take you on a journey with his playing.
There’s this great 1974 Seattle “Playing in the Band” that’s 46 minutes long [5/21/74]. I think it’s the longest performance. I caught it on the SiriusXM Dead station one day, and I was so struck by it as this art piece. It starts with this tuneful little song for two and a half or three minutes. Then Jerry solos for a while. Then gradually the chords go away, but you still have the tonality, and then gradually the tonality goes away, but you still have the drums and the pulse and the beat. Then eventually the beat deconstructs into other beats, and then it deconstructs into no beat, and then they’re kind of playing noise. Then gradually they put it back in element by element until 30 minutes later you come back to the song, and you are so happy to be in the land of music again.
That’s such an incredible artistic move, and to be brave enough to do that, knowing that they had an audience who would take it. At the end of the day, a worldwide audience is still listening to it, not just the people in Seattle who happened to be there. That music has been preserved and put on the pedestal it really deserves to be on. It’s as good as anything.
WHY NOT YOU AND ME?
DR: I think Gill is such a great singer and when we get her doing the Jerry stuff it’s a really good marriage because they both have a kind of sadness to how they sing. With a lot of these songs you have to listen to what the harmonies do to lift the song. Sometimes I’m singing leads so that we can have a tenor come in. Also, Paul Cowert will be with us for some of the songs. He’s such a great bass player, but he likes to sing and we’ve actually got him singing on some things where we need a little bit of a bigger section.
I’ll give some props here to Brent, because one of the keystones of the Reckoning album is his falsetto. Without his falsetto, that record would not be what it is. Brent had this incredible way, particularly right then when he joined the band, where it doesn’t seem like he was doing as much hard singing, and his voice is so sweet. I mean, sometimes in “Cassidy” or something like that, I’ll forget that it’s not Donna.
We’re going to take a swing at “It Must Have Been the Roses” but that is some high singing from Jerry, too. Something else that people might not notice is that on the record, “Dire Wolf” is in A. Then by the time they get to Reckoning, they’re not doing “Dire Wolf” in A or B-flat or B. Jerry’s pitched it up three half steps to C to sing it, which is a huge move. So they were in good shape.
The great strength of the music is that you can play some of those songs at an incredible variety of tempos and feels. You can improvise in the middle of them. You can play these huge solos or not play any solos, and the songs are built with this incredible flexibility, along with these wonderful stories.
GW: I’ve known the songs for so long, but by and large, I had never played them. So it’s been a really interesting process. In part, it’s been terrifying because I already held them in such high esteem but somehow I think they’re even heavier now.
As I’ve been shedding this stuff I see how the entire thing fits together like a little puzzle. This has been one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done and the most profoundly satisfying. I hope to God it doesn’t crash and burn. I promise you we’ll be doing our very best.