Revival

After a some six-week hiatus, I am listening to Gillian Welch again with the same feeling I did right before I went up into the mountains (though the echoes of it remained for the first couple of days). I don't mean Wrecking Ball or Wayside/Back in Time or the other songs from this Location(s). I mean just sitting on the sofa and listening to an entire album of hers in the sunlight. Her subject matter is so pure, as is her musical style. How unadulterated her singing voice and how simple David Rawling's picking. I need to go back to Art's Bar and Grille in Mt. Pleasant -- maybe biking over the Ravenel bridge to Sully's Island before and going back to that beach afterwards -- to hear Ward and Joel sing her music.
The Gillian Welch album that continues to impress me is Hell Among The Yearlings. It is her fourth released album, and stands out from her previous albums. You get to hear Gillian playing banjo, evoking a whole new range of images, mixes of wet and cold early-morning environments. Some of my favorite solo work by Rawlings is on this album.
There are many biking routes I wish to take and local journeys I'd like to pursue while the leaves are still on the trees in Charleston (excluding the evergreens, of course). I wish to bicycle up to Lake Moultrie and travel alongside it for a few miles east of Moncks Corner (about 50 miles round trip) and go up Hwy 176 to Holly Hill one morning, have Sweatman's BBQ for lunch, rest for an hour, then bike back home in the afternoon (it is 35 miles from my house to Holly Hill, so 70 miles round trip. I haven't biked that much in one day since coming home from Ninety-Six). An endurance run that I will only do once I get a better bicycle seat follows a route through Moncks Corner, down Hwy 41, and then through Awendaw to downtown Charleston and back home (I looked at it on google maps. It is 90 miles if I complete the whole circuit on bicycle, 75 if I take the bus home in the evening). I'm also going to pay a visit to Edisto Island before Autumn is over, so keep a look out for that.