Gillian Welch returns with long-awaited new album

By “we,’’ she means her life (and music) partner, David Rawlings. They’ve been working as a duo under a soloist’s name for more than 15 years now. The pair wrote hundreds of songs for the new album, recorded them in rough form and eventually discarded them in “a song cemetery.’’ Some she even forgot about until Rawlings brought them to her attention again.

It wasn’t until he began working on his first solo album, “A Friend of a Friend’’ released in 2009, that Welch, 43, began making headway on “The Harrow.’’

Welch’s last album was 2003’s “Soul Journey.’’ On that album, the two had gotten away from their usual harmony-based acoustic sound, cutting back on the duets and even employing drums for the first time.

In a sense, the 42-year-old Rawlings said, it jarred them out of their pattern of updating the music of the 1930s and `40s by groups like The Stanley Brothers, The Monroe Brothers and The Blue Sky Boys. Many of the songs on Rawlings album employed close harmony and that seemed to reinvigorate Welch, who wrote or retooled most of the songs for the new album in the next year.

Welch also found the simple act of traveling helped as well. The couple makes a conscious effort to take things slow in life, skipping planes for four wheels on the open highway and remaining disconnected as much as possible from the hustle of modern life.

“It’s a very creative time for us in the car,’’ Welch said in a phone interview from Los Angeles last week, where she was preparing to start a tour. “In fact, we don’t even take the interstate much these days. We’ve been traveling more on older highways. It’s definitely part of this record, that we’ve dispensed with the fastest route.’’