Gillian Welch: A New Voice on the Lonesome Road

It’s strange the way sad songs often make us feel so good. In Gillian Welch’s sensitive tales of hard times and troubled souls, there’s a measure of grace and compassion that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit.

While the pop world has been cheering the arrival of a host of great new female artists in rock and soul, there is also a remarkably talented group of ‘90s women in a folk and country vein, including Alison Krauss and Iris DeMent.

They are now joined by Welch, whose performance on Tuesday at LunaPark was masterful.

Rather than the honky-tonk country tradition of Loretta Lynn or the pop-country style of Shania Twain, Welch leans to the folk and early country side of Emmylou Harris, who has already recorded one of Welch’s songs.

I am an orphan on God’s highway, but I’ll share my troubles if you go my way.

Those are the first lyrics on Welch’s wonderfully evocative debut album, “Revival,” and they are sung with such sweet innocence that it’s hard to resist the invitation to follow her along.

In the album and on stage, she embarks on a journey of struggle and suffering that moves from the lonely dislocation of “Orphan Girl” to the even darker “Annabelle,” where a woman never quite recovers from the death of her infant daughter.

Elsewhere in Welch’s songs, characters sometimes feel so cut off from even the most ordinary expectations that they have to take whatever work they can find (“Barroom Girls”) or even end up taking what they need at the point of a gun (“Pass You By”).

In Tuesday’s show, where she and her songwriting partner David Rawlings both played acoustic guitars, moments of redemption and comfort rarely surfaced, except in the faith expressed in the gospel-edged numbers.

In “Annabelle,” Welch sings, “We cannot have all things to please us / No matter how we try / Until we’ve all gone to Jesus / We can only wonder why.”

Because the songs are set in old-timey strains, they seem drawn from an earlier age, with the people resembling the lonely, sometimes desperate faces seen in black-and-white photos from the Depression era.

Some critics have asked why Welch, a 28-year-old West Los Angeles native, looks back so much in her music and themes, but it’s obvious that she finds a simplicity in the old images and styles that helps her cut through the complexities and confusions of the present day.

Make no mistake, however: These songs speak to the restless social malaise of the ‘90s in touching and illuminating ways. And it’s that universal undercurrent in the music that stamps Welch as such a major--and contemporary--talent.

* Gillian Welch plays tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano, 8 p.m. $10. (714) 496-8927. Also Saturday at 8 and 10:30 p.m. and Sunday at 7 and 9:30 p.m. at McCabe’s, 3101 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica. Saturday and early Sunday shows sold out. Sunday $15. (310) 828-4403.