Empty Trainload of Sky

Here's a song to see the world through

Thomas Hart Benton, “America Today,” 1930

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Friends,

The past few weeks, I’ve listened to “Empty Trainload of Sky” over and over. It’s the single from Woodland, the new album by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. If you haven’t listened to them before, this duo sings from another century—one before plastic and screens, when music only needed string and wood and voice. The songs from that time could be hymn or holler, at ease on a porch just as much as a stage. It’s folk music, and it’s grounded too: in place, in history, in people.

I remember first seeing them on tour in Los Angeles over a decade ago, one of the few times I pushed my way to the front row of a concert. They were just two voices with two guitars under a spotlight, singing about a farmer struggling to plow his field:

Said it's a mean old world, heavy in need
And that big machine is just a-picking up speed
And we're supping on tears, and we're supping on wine
We all get to heaven in our own sweet time

This song “Hard Times” isn’t exactly nostalgic, which is yearning for a world that doesn’t exist. And it’s not playacting either, like Disney’s Frontierland, a warped copy of a copy of a copy. Gillian Welch’s and David Rawlings’ songs are rooted in sincere appreciation of the past—a desire to honor it, embody it, and push it forward into something new.

This is not a common posture to take, in music or in life. It’s much easier to try to separate ourselves from history, or to be so distracted by today’s shiny things (those “big machines”) that we leave the past behind, whether by intentional effort or neglect. But what do we lose when we only skim across the surface of today? We lose touch: with a sense of self, with each other, even with, paradoxically, the future.

I remember learning recently that Americans tend to see the past behind them and the future in front of them and that for many African communities, they see the exact opposite: the past in front of them, and the future behind them. This knocked my head off. Think about this spatial metaphor: if our backs are to the past, that means we’re walking away from it, leaving it behind. But if it’s in front of us, that means the future emerges from the past as we dialogue with our ancestors and the world we’ve inherited from them.

That’s the approach these two musicians take to their music: they’re looking squarely through the past into the future. It’s an approach that brings depth to their songs—they’re not just about personal expression or trending anthems. Their songwriting gathers history into the present so that when I heard “Hard Times,” Gillian’s plaintive alto, that farmer’s plight, and my own struggles (depression, seminary) merged into one voice. Long after that concert was over, I sang under my breath for months: “Hard times ain’t gonna rule my mind no more.”

“Empty Trainload of Sky” has a whole history to explore, too. An old train is the kind of thing you’d in the periphery, the backdrop to our modern lives as we blur from work to errands to home to screens to bed. But Welch and Rawlings not only take note of the train, they see through it into a whole world. The song begins:

Saw a freight train yesterday
It was chugging, plugging away
'Cross a river trestle so high
Just a boxcar of blue
Showing daylight clear through
Just an empty trainload of sky

The first verse sets up the image for us to envision: an old freight train with empty boxcars moves across a bridge. The onomatopoeia—chug, chug, chug—helps us hear it too. The only other detail of the train? A color that not only matches the sky behind it, but a word that gently references an entire genre: the blues. The empty boxcar should be hauling something, but it isn’t. Something’s not quite right, and it’s underlined musically with those minor chords. We’ll talk about that last line later, but if we stop here, we already have something we can easily see in our imaginations: a train with empty boxcars crosses a bridge on a clear day. Here’s the second verse:

Well it hit me and it hurt me
Made my good humor desert me
For a moment I was tempted to fly
To the Devil or the Lord
As it hung there like a sword
Just an empty trainload of sky

The empty boxcar hits the singer—it catches her eye and entices her to keep reflecting on what she sees. And then the hurt: a pang of grief? longing? something else? Whatever it is, her good humor drains out, and she’s knocked off her day. It’s like that feeling you get on the way to the grocery store and you drive by a wreck. You slow down, take a quick glance, and feel the quiet filling up the car. It’s that whoosh of awareness—that life is fragile and constantly changing, and sometimes we bear witness to it.

So where does her mind go? From the mundane to the sacred: heaven and hell, a sword marking the space between them like the angel of Eden. The train isn’t just a train, something about this empty boxcar is apocalyptic in its literal meaning: an uncovering, a revelation. The singer feels confronted with life in a profound way. There’s ambivalence and anxiety here, heightened by the sturdy theological terms we’ve inherited. This isn’t a novelty on an afternoon commute. The singer has tripped into an existential crisis, and the questions pour out of the empty boxcar:

Was it spirit? Was it solid?
Did I ditch that class in college?
Pulled the curtain from my eye
I said hey hey, my my

So is the boxcar actually empty? If the sky beyond the boxcar is also inside it, then why can you see one but not the other? Is the sky empty? Is there a spiritual dimension to life or not? Did I miss that day in class when we talked about the meaning of life and death? Or, to put it more bluntly: what the heck is going on here? Looking through the boxcar pulls a curtain from her eyes, and our eyes too. Her questions become our questions. And then there’s that last line: “I said hey hey, my my.” Okay, there’s actually a lot going on here in these few simple words.

One interpretation is that all the deep questions feel so big and elusive that there really aren’t words to answer them (If you want to nerd out, check out apophatic theology or the via negativa for more). In this reading, the singer is at a loss for words, which makes room for us as listeners to ask our own questions as Rawlings’ guitar takes over. But I think there’s another layer to this, too. Welch is quoting “Hey Hey, My My” by Neil Young, a song firmly in the lineage of rock and roll:

My my, hey hey
Rock and roll is here to stay
It's better to burn out than to fade away
My my, hey hey…

Hey hey, my my
Rock and roll can never die
There's more to the picture than meets the eye—
Hey hey, my my

Come on! This is why we obsessively explore the arts every week in Still Life. When I first heard this song, it sounded like a throwaway line. I felt genuinely disappointed and surprised (Welch and Rawlings don’t write throwaway lines), but then I did a bit of searching around online and discovered Neil Young’s 1979 performance of his song. And if you’re thinking “hey hey, Michael, that’s a stretch,” consider this: he was an early influence on both of them, they’ve covered his music and sung duets and toured together, and not only do these two songs share themes, they share the same key. Listen to these two songs back to back—there’s more to the lyric than meets the eye, indeed.

So this simple line is not only an exclamation. It also joins a musical elder who also meditates on the precarious life of touring musicians and the desire to make a mark. Every time Welch and Rawlings sing this line on tour, all of these layers overlap: the song’s protagonist, the singers, the listeners, Neil Young’s song, and artists everywhere trying to make sense of their lives in a changing world.

The song ends where we began: just an empty trainload of sky. Yes, there’s the surface meaning, since it’s an evocative way to describe what the singer sees. But by the end of the song when she repeats it as a refrain, it takes on all the depth of what we’ve explored so far. Let’s take it a word at a time.

Empty. This is a plaintive song, so the first feeling that comes with “empty” is a sense of loss, even grief. This boxcar used to be filled with goods, and now everything is delivered. It’s emptied out. It’s been used for its intended purpose, and now there’s nothing left.

Trainload. All the empty boxcars make up one train. This word expands that sense of loss. It makes me think of how trains used to be the primary means of transportation of people and goods. It was fundamental to the economic development of this country, and cities lived and died based on their proximity to the railway. A trainload evokes an entire transportation system we’ve discarded for the cars and planes. This interpretation makes sense to me given the reference to the “river trestle” since before trains, the fasted way anywhere was the waterway. With “trainload,” a sense of loss spreads.

Sky. But then, there’s “sky.” Just like seeing through the empty boxcar to the open sky, the singer sees through everything we’ve explored above—the loss, the love of the analog, the anxiety about entering sunset years, the frustration with a world so willing to give up good things—and sees something bigger beyond it. There’s something freeing in the loss, a sense of paring down to what’s essential, an expansiveness beyond the confines of the big machine.

It’s an interpretation that makes sense given where they recorded “Empty Trainload of Sky.” Woodland Studios is historic: countless artists have gone through there including the legends of the Will The Circle Be Unbroken sessions. They also own the place, and when a tornado tore through Nashville in 2020, the studio was severely damaged. Most of the songs were written in the years since, and the themes make sense: rebuilding and taking stock, reckoning with loss, thinking about legacy.

But then, the song isn’t just about two musicians and the woodland is more than a recording studio or an album. The good songs take on a life of their own, keep living and growing well beyond the last breath of their writers. They change the air. “Empty Trainload of Sky,” like so many like it, is a gift from the songwriter. They look around and get to writing, gathering up emotion and story and history and distilling it all down to a handful of words, some chords, and a melody. Then we start listening, and their eyes become our eyes too. We look with them out into an endless sky.

Take care,

Michael

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P.s. I didn’t even touch on the “train” as an all-American metaphor for social progress. There are gospel trains, peace trains, trains bound for glory, and trains that stop you in your tracks. Don’t take my word for it—take a listen to this playlist I made for you:

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