Welch announces release of "Boots No. 2"

The new collection is unearthed from a cache of home demos and reel-to-reel recordings and is the second release of archival music from Welch and Rawlings. This 48-song collection, spread over three volumes and produced by Rawlings, was recorded between the making of "Time (The Revelator)" and "Soul Journey."

"Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs, Vol. 2" and "Vol. 3" will follow in the coming months.

Welch also released the first two songs from the collection, "Strange Isabella" and "Mighty Good Book."

"We stashed these recordings away years ago," Rawlings and Welch said inn a statement. "Their shortcomings, real or imagined, technical or compositional, no longer seem bothersome today. Hearing them now is like seeing snapshots that captured moments the more formal portraits missed. So here we are hurrying them for release before the next tornado blows the whole shoebox away."

"These songs disorient you in time because Gillian Welch blends past and present in a way that makes the past, present." Jedediah Purdy writes in the album's liner notes. "To listen through 'Boots 2' is to feel you have gotten thoroughly lost, and maybe drunk or worse, in a landscape of strangers. It is also to feel that, wandering through that landscape, you might actually never have left your house, and it might not matter whether you did or not, since you have become a stranger to yourself. It is like going through weeks when the sun refuses to shine, or maybe your body just refused to go out and meet it, because the sun had become hateful to you. Saying that it feels this way - which it does - risks making this music sound like a bummer. It is not. It is a trip. It is also a joy."

"Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs" comes after 2016's B"oots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg," a double album of unreleased outtakes, alternate versions, and demos from the making of the 1996 debut album.

The pair recently released "All The Good Times," a new album of 10 acoustic covers recorded at home on a reel-to-reel. The album contains songs by Bob Dylan, John Prine, Elizabeth Cotten and Norman Blake, as well as new arrangements of traditional songs.

The track list is:
1. Johnny Dear
2. First Place Ribbon
3. Give That Man A Road
4. Mighty Good Book
5. Chinatown
6. Fly Down
7. Shotgun Song
8. Apalachicola
9. Strange Isabella
10. Little Luli
11. Valley of Tears
12. Blind On The Inside
13.Back Turn And Swing
14. Roll On
15.Honey Baby
16. Here Come The News