Songfacts®:

• "Empty Trainload Of Sky" is the opening track from Gillian Welch and David Rawlings' 2024 album Woodland. It is the first album of original material from Welch since The Harrow & the Harvest (2011) and from Rawlings since Poor David's Almanack (2017). Woodland is the second album to be credited to them as a duo following the covers album All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone) in 2020.
• "Empty Trainload of Sky" is a bluesy folk song, characteristic of Welch and Rawlings' style. The yearning lyrics evoke rural American imagery, including freight trains and river trestles.
• The inspiration for the song came one summer in the early evening during the early pandemic days when Welch, out for a solo stroll near her East Nashville home, paused near a trestle bridge spanning the Cumberland River. She watched as a freight train clattered by, framed by the blue horizon. And then it hit her: An empty trainload of sky. "For a moment, I couldn't tell if the train or the sky was moving," she later recounted to The Sun. "Maybe it was a trick of the light and an empty boxcar, but it was very arresting."
  
  Welch sat down on a park bench right there and didn't get up until the first verse was down. Back home, she shared the phrase with Rawlings. The two finished the song that very afternoon, and it became the cornerstone of the album.
• For a while, "Empty Trainload of Sky" was also the intended title of the album. "That somehow was at the core of it," Welch told Mojo magazine.
  
  But rather late in the years-long process of writing and refining, Welsh and Rollings pivoted. They renamed it Woodland after their Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, which was nearly destroyed by a devastating tornado in 2020.
  
  "Oh my goodness, it was awful," Welch said. It took two years to rebuild the studio, a process that reshaped their thinking - and their music. "We were asking ourselves, 'What is this all for? Maybe the things you think are permanent, are not.'"
• Woodland garnered positive reviews for its blend of traditional Americana with contemporary elements, showcasing Welch and Rawlings' signature harmonies and lyrical depth. Critics loved it. It landed on numerous year-end lists, placing fourth in Mojo's "75 Best Albums of 2024" and second in Uncut's "80 Best Albums of 2024."