Have you seen Midnight in Paris? You should. Without giving too much away, the film's central theme revolves around people being nostalgic for times they never knew - for ages they weren't alive to experience. Owen Wilson, as the Woody Allen substitute, feels he missed out by not being alive to experience Paris in the 1920s, and all of the heady implications and images that are brought up by juxtaposing that city and that decade.

Listening to Gillian Welch - in particular her new album, The Harrow & The Harvest - there's a palpable yearning that lurks in and around her music. Welch's adherence to classicism in the areas of folk, bluegrass and country has about it the mournful pang of nostalgia for a time she never experienced. While some songs bend closer to '70s singer-songwriter sounds, the majority of the album centers on the rustic sounds of the 1920s through the 1950s. There's a hew toward a time when songs largely were about characters and their heartfelt stories - albums were tapestries of American lives and the hardships and triumphs that were constantly occurring concurrently.

Welch's melancholy, meandering "Tennessee" has the sweetly sung chorus, "It's beef steak when I'm working, whiskey when I'm dry and sweet heaven when I die." Those words are repeated over and over as the song comes to a close, almost as a mantra, or a self-fulfilling prophecy. She refers, as the name suggests, to Tennessee, her home and hopeful resting place. This song, and that line in particular, do well to some up the general feel of The Harrow & The Harvest: it's largely a slow album, steady, colored by a faraway desire for a place other than the one in which the narrator currently resides.

The Harrow & The Harvest sounds like that thumping thought in the back of your head saying, "Take up residence in the place to which you've long dreamt of running."

Gillian Welch

with Dave Rawlings
Saturday, July 16, 8:30 p.m., $25, $20 OFS members
Capitol Theater, 206 Fifth Ave. SE, Olympia
360.754.6670