Gillian Welch & David Rawlings Make Triumphant ‘Tiny Desk’ Return With ‘Woodland’ Magic

Fifteen years after their last appearance on the series, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings recently swung by NPR Music’s Washington D.C. headquarters to perform a Tiny Desk Concert. The duo continued a victory lap for their Grammy-winning 2024 album, Woodland, by playing three songs from the LP along with an old favorite.

Welch and Rawlings took home the 2025 Best Folk Album Grammy for their 10th studio album. The pair has been touring hard in support of Woodland, which they recorded at their Woodland Sound Studios facility in Nashville.

“Woodland is at the heart of everything we do and has been for the last twenty some years. The past four years were spent almost entirely within its walls, bringing it back to life after the 2020 tornado and making this record. The music is (songs are) a swirl of contradictions, emptiness, fullness, joy, grief, destruction, permanence. Now,” Welch and Rawlings said of their latest album when it was announced.

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings opened their first proper Tiny Desk set since 2010 with the powerful “Empty Trainload Of Sky.” The duo moved forward with fellow Woodland standouts “Lawman” and “Hashtag.”

Welch pointed out the desk was much tinier when they last visited 15 years ago. “This is kind of a mid-sized tiny desk,” Gillian stated. She also revealed the pair left their tuner at the building and was shocked to see it was still there. “Good to know we haven’t changed too much, we still use the same kind of tuner,” Welch added after donating the tool to NPR Music.

The acclaimed duo sealed their set with “Revelator,” a song featured on their 2001 studio album, Time (The Revelator). The two musicians’ voices and acoustic guitars mixed together in the impressive fashion that has brought them so much success over the past 30 years.

Watch Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ latest Tiny Desk Concert session below: