Acclaimed Americana duo Gillian Welch and David Rawlings return to Australia for just the third time ever this month, playing a string of theatre shows in Sydney and Melbourne across two weeks.

The shows sold out promptly, to the surprise of none of their fans. These are two songwriters of the highest order, whose live performances are spellbinding, transformative affairs.

Their jaw-dropping musicality and the heart-melting combination of their voices induce chills, while the sense of intimacy they bring to any room makes their show unlike any other.

That intimacy is vital, and it comes at a cost.

Some back-of-the-napkin maths suggests that Welch and Rawlings could easily have breezed in and out of Australia far quicker than they are.

Five sold-out shows at Melbourne's Hamer Hall will see them playing to more than 10,000 people, while three sold-out Sydney Opera House shows will have them perform to a similar number in the Harbour City.

But anyone who has seen Welch and Rawlings understands that the thought of experiencing their show in a soulless arena is tantamount to sacrilege. And the duo knows more than anyone that it just wouldn't work.

"Both of those rooms are just spectacular sounding," Rawlings tells Saturday Night Country's Beccy Cole of the venues they'll play on this visit.

"We've never really wanted to get into rooms much bigger than that because, even at that size, we want to be able to capture the intimacy of the shows that we've played over the years.

"I would rather play 10 nights in a room that we love when we thought we were giving the best show we could, then play a giant stadium where people weren't getting the same thing."

Easy to say, but it's another thing to put your money where your mouth is. Welch and Rawlings have always walked the walk though.

"We got an offer very sweetly from Zach Bryan, who plays massive rooms here, to open at a stadium in Atlanta for him," Rawlings says.

"I know so many people who'd just leap at those sorts of things. I like his music, and would love to do the show but it's like, 'Sorry, we can't do a good job. What you think you like about us isn't going to come through that football stadium, so we'll politely decline'."

The space in which they play is especially vital because Welch and Rawlings eschew even basic technology when it comes to achieving their perfect live sound.

"At the end of the day, we are still pretty close to chamber music," Welch says. "We are playing acoustic instruments. There aren't pick-ups on stage. I sometimes think that the theatre is almost like another member of the band. It has a big impact on the way we play."

Welch and Rawlings first toured Australia in 2004, flooring audiences along the east coast with flawless performances.

"There were goosebumps-on-goosebumps as utter perfection unfolded in front of us," I wrote in a retrospective review in 2022. "Music so beautiful, organic and expertly played it felt like it should be behind a glass case."

"Both of the tours were pretty unforgettable for us," Rawlings recalls.

"I don't know if people thought we would ever actually make the trip, because it's pretty well known that we don't like to fly," Welch adds. "So, people just seemed almost in disbelief and overjoyed that we were there. I've just never really felt anything like that."

While visiting Australia is not easy for the duo, who have been open about their struggles with air travel, they promise it's always worthwhile.

On their second trip, the band flew into Perth and avoided any more flights by jumping in the car and driving across the country.

"I had the crackpot idea, 'Let's go into Perth, drive the Nullarbor, tour all the way up to Brisbane and Byron Bay, then fly my band in and tour it back down to Melbourne. Let's just be there and see as much of the country'," Rawlings says.

"That's what we love about touring [in the USA], and always have, is we know this country so well from the miles that we've driven behind our own wheel. We don't do it in a bus and wouldn't want to because of what you get out of it. What you learn and the experiences you have when you just tour in a car."

That big trip across Australia was well and truly worthwhile, giving the duo a picture of the country many of us have never experienced.

"We have photographs that just don't even look real," Welch says. "One time, we stopped the car pretty close to the longest straight patch of highway on the planet [Western Australia's Eyre Highway]. We walked away from the car, and just walked out across the red dirt. It was extraordinary.

"I've never really seen a landscape like that, and that's saying something because, as Dave said, we've driven a million miles around this country [the US]. We've never seen anything like that."

In 2020, after decades of working together and appearing all over one another's records, the couple released All The Good Times, a collection of cover versions and their first ever duo album.

They backed this up in 2024 with Woodland, featuring Welch's first released original material since 2011's The Harrow & The Harvest, and Rawlings's first since 2017's Poor David's Almanack.

"When we really get down to it, we tend to make albums in about six weeks," Welch says. "But it takes us quite a while to get the songs together. I wish that we wrote faster, but it just is what it is."

Fans will be pleased to hear the duo wrote a lot of material in their long stint between albums. Given the inherent versatility, that offers the pair plenty of options when it comes to how they'll package up their resulting product.

"We had almost a double record's worth of songs, or two records' worth of songs, and had been working for a while thinking, 'Well, maybe this is a double, or maybe this is a record under my name and a record under Dave's name'," Welch says.

"All of a sudden, we hit upon a group of songs that we had done that really felt like they spoke to each other and felt like they had a theme," Rawlings adds.

"We were just really happy to be able to get to that point. And we were maybe as surprised as anyone that, all of a sudden, there was a record."