Trainload of Sky

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Thebarton Theatre. 22 Feb 2026

 

Once again, the gods arrived by car. Last time they played in Adelaide, in 2016, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings drove across the Nullabor from Perth. This time, it was a non-stop journey from Canberra via a visit to a Murray Cod fishing competition in Barham -Koondrook in New South Wales. “They made us very welcome” drawls Rawlings.

 

They are also very welcome on a Sunday night at Thebarton Theatre. Rarely have I been among a more expectant crowd. Ten years has been a long wait, and the duo had only played Adelaide once before in their now nearly thirty year career.

 

They step on stage like there hasn’t been a yesterday and—in their modest, attentive, focused way—like there may not be a tomorrow. They stand shoulder to shoulder at twin microphones; each rigged for vocals and their signature guitars.

 

Welch, in her ankle-length charcoal cotton dress, has her slim arms draped around her 1956 Gibson J-50 flat-top, while Rawlings in his corn-coloured Stetson, brown suede jacket and battered denims has his 1935 Epiphone Olympic arch-top ready to roll.

 

There’s some ‘howdy y’all Adelaide’ plus a short motoring report with a Q &A, and then Welch opens with Wayside/Back in Time from the Soul Journey album. “Standing on the corner with a nickel or a dime/ there used to be a railcar to take you down the line/ too much beer and whisky to ever be employed …Wasted on the wayside…Back baby, back in time/ I wanna go back when you were you mine.”

 

Welch, now with silver threads in her hair, her voice perhaps more mellow than keening, instantly engages with her particular version of alt. country, Americana, or whatever best describes that music which refers to previous times and places, but has the vividness of the present.

 

Immersed in (and brilliantly revitalising) the ballad tradition, Welch and Rawlings can inhabit archetypal personas—railroad drifters or broken lovers, grieving mothers, or struggling sharecroppers—as convincingly as Dylan or Neil Young, June Carter Cash, or Emmylou Harris.

 

Showcasing their Grammy-winning album Woodland, named for their Nashville recording studio (restored after near obliteration by tornadoes in 2020) they move to the opening track and one of their best compositions – Empty Trainload of Sky. “Just a boxcar of blue/ showing daylight clear through/ just an empty trainload of sky.”

 

Their vocal harmonies thread together with a kind of effortless intimacy, Welch’s guitar sets the rhythm and tempo and then Rawlings adds his hypnotic, filigree fingerpicking - nimble, supple and with real swing. Unlike the album, there is no bass and drum (or strings) yet somehow in performance the two guitars are more than an excellent sufficiency.

 

On the pensive What We Had Rawlings leads with his sweet tenor, then joined by Welch, it becomes Country pop – even shades of The Carpenters.

From his Poor David’s Almanac album, Rawlings takes an excursion into Midnight Train. Virtuoso train songs are a staple of folk blues – from Robert Johnson to Bukka White and Tom Rush.

 

Rawlings hitches his guitar close, holding it almost vertically and begins to thread into his musical locomotion. No bottleneck slide, but instead an extended raga of accelerating intricacy and rail rattling speed. More Woodland songs follow – all joint compositions by the duo. The Bells and the Birds is a delight with Rawlings’ chiming guitar and Gillian Welch’s winsome vocal.

 

When she reaches for her clawhammer banjo Welch observes (at song number seven) that it is the longest they have waited to bring on the banjo for the whole tour. Instantly, I hope it will be for My First Lover from the Revelator album. Instead it’s for Howdy Howdy. A lovely opening trickle of plunking notes, echoed on guitar – “Tell me what did the blackbird say to the crow…” First it is Rawlings, then Welch takes a turn – their voices almost indistinguishable.

 

After Tennessee from the classic The Harrow & The Harvest CD, Rawlings digs out Sweet Tooth from the Rawlings Machine Friend of the Family sessions. It is a hopped-up ragtime cocaine candy song, bristling with guitar brilliance and marks an up-beat ending to the first set.

 

This is a rich event and full of surprises and highlights. After Annabelle from the early Revival and, interspersed with harmonica, the intriguing Hashtag from Woodland, Gillian Welch reaches for the banjo again. Not My First Lover but Hard Times. Slow march tune, melancholy but defiant vocal, threadbare ambling music – “Hard times ain’t gonna rule my mind… no more!”

 

Repeated like a mantra, and then David Rawlings brings in guitar and vocal reinforcement. It is spellbinding and thrilling to be in the same room in which this is happening. Just like hearing this exceptional duo at Her Majesty’s back in 2016.

 

There are other excellent notables – Rawlings singing Ruby, a memorable reading of Everything is Free from Time (the Revelator) beautifully phrased by Welch while Rawlings decorates the vocal with sweet serenades. All coaxed from the one guitar, there are no busy guitar techs swapping and tuning. At one point in the first set, Rawlings tunes a string while he is playing something inexplicably labyrinthine. With his mysterious tunings and sublime plucking he keeps surpassing himself as the concert unfolds – and the performance is filled with feeling, never just technique.

 

The set finishes with an expansive version of the sweet and sour The Way that it Goes. With its folky rhythm and crooning world weariness it is like a punkish swipe at the unmentionable world outside.

 

The encores are generous. Make Me a Pallet on the Floor, a tribute to Doc Watson, with whom they toured early in their careers, and a rousing and rocking Look at Miss Ohio.

 

But wait there is more. Guy Clark’s Desperadoes Waiting for a Train is another highlight, with its sepulchral repetitions and descending chord lines it more than honours a classic song. As is I’ll Fly Away—Gillian Welch’s duet with Alison Krauss on the soundtrack for O Brother Where Art Thou?—sung like a benediction to end the proceedings.

 

The lights go up and everyone is packing up—replete and grateful for 22 extraordinary songs—when Gillian Welch comes back onstage to get us seated again. It’s as if they hadn’t driven all this way to be stopping quite yet.

 

The closer is heralded by those strummed chords, almost dirge-like but filled with a quiet ecstasy – Revelator from the album of the same name. Recorded 25 years ago and never sounding better. Guitars in perfect accord, Rawlings brilliant one last time, Welch’s vocals flawless - the rhythm of their singing and playing like a metronome of the heart.

 

 

Gillian Welch didn’t get to play My First Lover on the banjo, but you can’t have everything. On second thoughts, in this exceptional concert, I think we just did.

 

Murray Bramwell

 

When: 22 Feb

Where: Thebarton theatre

Bookings: Closed

Ben Folds & A Piano Tour

Thebarton Theatre. Frontier Touring. 24 Feb 2026

 

This is the seventh time that Ben Folds has played the Thebarton Theatre, the first being almost 20 years back in 1997. For a short period in the late 90s–early 2000s he and his (then) wife called Adelaide home, and the ease with which he played, sang and wooed the capacity ‘Thebby’ crowd tonight would indicate he still feels very much at home in Adelaide. But he seems to be the sort of person who can feel ‘at home’ anywhere—life is what you make of it—and his concert was very much an exploration of key moments in his life.

 

The concert begins with his support act Lindsey Kraft taking to the stage. She is unassuming and with self-deprecating humour. She was originally an actor (including playing Allison in the hit Netflix series Grace and Frankie) and eventually turned her hand to song and music making. As a pianist, she has modest abilities—simple melody in the right hand, chordal accompaniment in the left—but she has a straight-tone soprano voice that pitches true and creates a sweet and pure tone. Her song lyrics are meaningful, and she sings a song about her dad and one about her mum in her program. They are straight from the heart, and the audience warms to her very quickly.

 

Interestingly, she has written a musical We’ve Been Here Before that will be playing at the Holden Street Theatres during Fringe, and Ben Folds will be there as musical director. The relationship between Folds and Kraft helped create a structure to tonight’s concert – all the best concerts have one.

 

Solo popular concerts are very revealing. The solo artist is vulnerable and has nowhere to hide; there’s no backing group to disguise performance errors or lack of musical prowess; there’s no real opportunity to rest; the success (or otherwise) of the concert falls wholly on the prowess and skill of the soloist. Kraft succeeds as an opener, and Folds almost overwhelms the audience with his pianistic skill, song selection, and sequencing, high energy vocals, and entertaining conversation and smattering of irreverent patter.

 

As Folds walked on stage, One by Harry Nilsson was playing on the theatre’s sound system. Interesting choice. Gone are the days of Ben Folds Five. Gone are his marriages. He is unaccompanied, and alone on stage, with no flashy light show; just him with a grand piano. Exposed.

 

His first song is the poignant So There, which he follows with Don’t Change Your Plans. The deep melancholy and pathos of each song ripples through his whole body as he plays the piano with muscularity and purpose. The detailed passage work at the piano is impressive (but overamplified, arguably).

And then the audience erupted with heartfelt applause. He must have known they were with him.

 

It had never occurred to me that Ben Folds’ songs are rarely covered. In some ways, this is a testimony to the deeply personal nature of his material and consequently means so much more when they are sung by him. However, his next song, Boxing, was covered in 1998 by the iconic Bette Midler. It is an imaginary interview between famous American sports journalist, broadcaster and author Howard Cosell and boxer Muhammad Ali, in which the singer takes the perspective of Ali. Folds gives the final repeated phrase ‘Has boxing been good?’ a bravura treatment at the piano as he almost lifts himself off the piano bench. Again, over amplified to the point of distortion.

 

Then follows a range of songs interspersed with humorous anecdotes and comments about their genesis, ranging from how he approached song writing and music composition as a boy, through to the birth of his children, break-up of relationships, his musical responses during the COVID pandemic, sorting out junk, and through to the unexpected passing of a dear friend. His performance of What Matters Most becomes a moment of personal reflection for every member of the audience as they ponder the final lyric ‘Tell me, what matters most? Mmm.’ There follows a momentary silence. Then heartfelt and generous applause.

 

But the biggest thrill of the night is his inclusion of the song Adelaide, and Folds explains that the city of Adelaide and its inhabitants have surely outgrown the cultural cringe with which the city (and South Australia more generally) has been associated. To whoops of cheers and laughter, Folds states he no longer feels the need to be the “defence attorney for Adelaide” and offer apologies on our behalf. An admirable trait of Aussies is our ability to laugh at ourselves, and we do so as he sings every irreverent phrase from the song!

 

His program also included You Don’t Know Me first released on his 2008 album Way to Normal. It includes the repeated lyric ‘you don’t know me at all’ and the audience responds with ‘at all’ with full throated voice. But, to the contrary, after this deeply personal concert we do feel we know Ben Folds, at least a little bit better, and we want even more.

 

Kym Clayton

 

When: 24 Feb

Where: Thebarton Theatre

Bookings: Closed

Tour Continuing through Melbourne, Bendigo, Perth, Newcastle, Geelong, and Hobart. 

More info: frontiertouring.com/benfolds

Nine Breaths, Sean Williams: CD Review

Prize-winning Adelaide author Sean Williams is well known for his apparently inexhaustible output of speculative fiction for young people. His realist novel Impossible Music (Allen & Unwin, 2019) is a fascinating portrayal of a young musician who must cope with suddenly becoming profoundly deaf.

 

Williams is also a senior lecturer in creative writing at Flinders University.

 

On top of all that, Williams is a composer and, writing under the moniker TheAdelaidean, he has released over 25 albums of what is broadly categorised as ambient music.

Ambient music has a long history, dating back to the first electronically produced music of Pierre Schaffer and Eliane Radigue and even before that to Erik Satie’s Furniture Music.

 

Ambient music is often arrhythmic and may appear to have little or no structure, so that the listener is immersed in long-duration tones and textures. Brian Eno is said to have coined the term ‘ambient music’ and is one of its principal exponents.

 

Ambient music stimulates an awareness of sound quite different from that induced by the melodic development, harmonies, rhythms and modulations of ‘conventional’ music. It may be produced using any form of instrumentation but is commonly created electronically, sometimes with recorded samples of live performance or of environmental sounds — musique concrète — which may be transformed, manipulated and repeated, and there can be similarities with Minimalism. The effect of such music is often soothing, and listeners might let their minds wander rather than focussing on the origin or nature of the sound as it progresses.

 

Williams’s work is frequently innovative and explores ideas beyond the simple generation of sound. For example, his three-CD, three-hour and 48-minute album, Hyperaurea (2023), is a sonic evocation of Antarctica and is accompanied by a detailed and enthralling memoir of the time he spent there on an Australian Antarctic Division Arts Fellowship. The album’s launch at the Flinders University Museum of Art was accompanied by videos of Antarctica, making for a thoroughly immersive experience for the audience.

 

Williams’s latest release, Nine Breaths, departs from his recent work in that it introduces the Japanese poetic form, the haiku, a form which he notes is short enough to be recited in a single breath. In the Japanese tradition, haiku typically comprise three lines of five, seven and five syllables and convey a momentary perception or elicit a sudden awareness, usually of a natural phenomenon. In its English form, the number of syllables is flexible.

 

For Nine Breaths, Williams has written nine haiku and a piece of music to accompany or evoke each poem. The first eight compositions occupy one CD and the ninth occupies the whole of a second CD. There are programmatic elements in some of the pieces and what sound like sampled elements.

 

The poem Loss is as follows:

 

in the throng
familiar perfume
— loss, found

 

In the composition for Loss, we hear ethereal synthesised music accompanying a voice reciting an excerpt from the poem Tatiana’s Letter from Alexander Pushkin’s Eugen Onegin. The emotionally charged reading is said to be by A Tarasova and it’s presumably taken from Russian actress Alla Tarasova’s 78 rpm recording of 1917.

 

Tremble in Worship goes:

 

upraised palms
tremble in worship
— spring shower

 

In the composition for Tremble in Worship, there are periodic, booming beats as if from a drum and each of these beats triggers a burst of harmonics that then slowly and quietly decay. In Buddhist thought, such repetitive beats are a call to mindfulness. There is a rustling sound quietly in the background, possibly suggesting gentle rain or someone moving about or the whisper of air.

 

In Courting Dust, rapid, rhythmic, piano-like tinkling sounds cascade hypnotically and suggest a cloud of dust motes in a shaft of sunlight. Each note of the piano sound varies slightly, suggesting a human rather than an electro-mechanical performer, and in the background, the synthesised sound of a choir enriches the sonic weave:

 

sunlight
courting dust
— weightless pirouettes

 

The composition Horizon, at over an hour in length, is a finely nuanced orchestration of sound:

 

eyes closed
reframe
the horizon

 

The idea of such a short poem eliciting an extended piece of music seems ironic, but the listener enters a relaxed state, and their attention might alternate between the theme of the haiku, their breathing and the music’s delightful intricacies.

 

Sean Williams’s Nine Breaths creates a highly original and engaging correspondence between music and text. Each poem and its accompanying composition can induce not only heightened aural awareness, musical pleasure and a meditative or imaginative state but also serious philosophical thought. It’s an exquisite addition to the genre of ambient music.

 

Chris Reid

 

Sean Williams, Nine Breaths (Project Records, 2026), is available on CD or as a download.

More info: theadelaidean.com

Songs Of Joy

Graduate Singers. St Peter’s Cathedral. 12 Dec 2025

 

The Graduate Singers (or the ‘Grads) are an impressive outfit. They sing beautifully, they tackle diverse repertoire, they have a large and loyal following (understandably), and they are dramatic in their delivery.

 

Tonight’s concert, their final one for the year, is being held in St Peter’s Cathedral on a balmy summer’s evening to a near capacity audience. The program includes classics from both the sacred and secular repertoire, and … community carol singing, which for many was a highlight of the event.

 

The Grads number fifty-five at full strength and tonight’s concert features forty-four of them, not including Karl Geiger – their Director of Music and tonight’s conductor. St Peter’s presents challenges for such a large choir: it’s not easy to fit them in (along with any instrumentalists), and the acoustic of the cathedral punishes less than precise singing.

 

Geiger’s selection of songs was clever. Collectively they told the story of Christmas from religious and worldly perspectives, and they laid bare the evolution of spiritual thinking to something less mysterious, more relaxed and grounded in humanism. A greater contrast there could not be in starting the concert with Once in Royal David’s City as a community carol, following it with Hassler’s 1591 setting of The Word Became Flesh and ending the program with Joseph Twist’s joyous tongue-firmly-in-cheek Australian carol Christmas in the Sun! At appropriate times the audience sat in hushed reverential silence, and at others they were whistling and laughing. The concert had everything.

 

Geiger has obvious command of the choir, with clear and purposeful gesturing that evokes appropriate emotional responses from the choristers as well as instructions for tempi, dynamics and timing. And Geiger is mischievous! He toys with the audience as he encourages them to sing even louder the next time to raise the vaulted roof of the cathedral. It was almost pantomimical and one could imagine exchanges along the lines of “I bet you can sing louder!”, “Oh no we can’t”, “Oh yes you can!”. It was a joy.

 

Cleverly, Geiger has the choir surround the entire audience on four sides at the beginning. The process, and the occasion feels solemn as well as theatrical. David Heah on organ is impressive, with carefully controlled dynamics, and he works well with the five instrumentalists, which include trumpet, trombone, cello, horn and tuba (which is especially well played).

 

As previously mentioned, the acoustic of a cathedral space is challenging, and vocal articulation is vital if a large choir is to be clearly heard (and understood). The Grads are particularly effective in delivering clear diction with songs that are pacier, and when they are unaccompanied and vibrato is minimised. There are some issues with clarity at the beginnings of phrases in My Lord Has Come, but Silent Night is near perfect and the audience clearly enjoy John Rutter’s novel arrangements of the music.

 

Mistletoebird is a highlight of the concert, and it’s a joy that the composer Rachel Bruerville is in the room to receive deserved applause from the large appreciative audience. Their rendition of The Magi’s Dream was dramatic and solid evidence of the Grads ability to convincingly tell a story through song.

 

The absolute highlight of the evening is a spirited performance of The Twelve Days of Christmas which included excellent and controlled dynamics, and a humorous burst of speed towards its conclusion. As an aside, there is a quirky article in the December 2025 edition of the Interlude.HK classical music newsletter entitled “A Fun Cost Analysis on 12 Days of Christmas” in which the authors estimate the cost of giving all those gifts! If you’re doing the full measure, which would be 12 partridges, 22 turtle doves, 30 French hens, etc., for a total of 364 presents, you’re at over $1.5 million for 12 days of fun. $1,535,405.64, to be exact. It’s expensive to be whimsical!

 

But there’s nothing whimsical about a Grads concert, and Songs of Joy is a vocal celebration of joy, a celebration of the human voice, and an affirmation of all that is virtuous with humanity.

 

Kym Clayton

 

When: 12 Dec

Where: St Peter’s Cathedral

Bookings: Closed