THE WAY PEOPLE react to love, or good news, or certain recreational drugs, is like an answer on a personality test. Some – girls who dotted their i's with little hearts in high school, people who vote yes in online magazine polls asking whether there's hope for the future – get so high off what's happening that they suffer hallucinations of the good times expanding out to the horizon. Others – like me – start worrying about the end as soon as things look good; no time like the present to begin brooding about the fact that life will never again be the same. Call it sabotage. Call it extremely neurotic. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy like my friends in college did whenever I complained. Sooner or later you feel like you expected to all along: hungover, disappointed, out of love, single.

Which is why Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) always worried me. Sometimes, before I got used to it being in the world, for months after it came out, I would lie on my bed listening to it and reverently examine the picture of Welch on the front of the case, wondering what would happen next. Practically every song on the album became my favorite eventually, starting with the desolate, adamant "Everything Is Free" and ending with "My First Lover," gorgeously trashed and tired out. It was one of the most completely satisfying full-lengths I'd come across since outgrowing the soundtrack to Xanadu – right up there, fittingly, with Neutral Milk Hotel's Aeroplane over the Sea, an album that seems destined never, ever to reincarnate and return to earth. As a coworker of mine said recently, Time was like lightning had struck something. And while I hate to draw on clichés, his saying so after listening to the new album, Soul Journey, did draw to mind the odds of that happening twice.

Soul Journey (a name that sends the wrong kind of chills down my spine) comes out nearly two years after Time and has, I know, nothing to do with a self-fulfilling prophecy, or at least nothing to do with my bad attitude. Maybe Welch psyched her own self out, worrying about whether lightning would strike again and how that might feel. Or maybe this is the album she and songwriting partner David Rawlings felt like making this time around, something sparser, something that turned back to traditions and away from revelations. Whatever the case, things are not the way they were.

You can't have everything. Why would anyone expect to have it twice, much less twice in a row? A person can lose sight of how hard it might be to write even one memorable and precious song, the kind that stays trapped in people's heads because they want it there. That might have been on Welch's mind. On "One Little Song" she looks for ones that haven't been sung, "one little rag that ain't been wrung out completely yet, that's got a little left," "one little word that ain't been abused a thousand times in a thousand rhymes." "Everybody can't have thought of everything," she sings, though they probably have.

Which brings us back to the singles life. Singles meaning the songs you would pick to play on the radio over and over if you were the DJ, the ones you put on mix tapes instead, when they need somewhere to go outside of your head; mix tapes meaning the ones you make once you've let go of the rest of the album. The songs are markers for obsessions, just as mixed tapes (for anyone still acknowledging the format) are often a sign of love – a tweaker project for those high on complementary pheromones, holding a weight that's almost too much for a strip of metal-coated Mylar to bear.

That's just how it is when there's no album to take all that weight; you have to float from record to record. So this week I stuck with the singles, listening to Skating Club's Bugs and Flowers for "Stockholm," a song about old girlfriends and how to replace them; the Decemberists' Castaways and Cutouts for "Leslie Ann Levine," about a perished baby girl who haunts the place where she died; Julie Doiron's new split with Okkervil River for "Snowfalls in November," on which Doiron sings about good times with a shake in her voice, as if she's practiced at imagining their absence; and most of all Welch's "Look at Miss Ohio," from the new album. "I wanna do right but not right now," Welch sings, on a song that somehow recalls "My First Lover" and "Everything Is Free." The way those songs combined good times and bad behavior, folk and rock and country idioms, old-time stories and dug-up memories, this one signals a breakdown somewhere, confusing the lines between past and present and carrying, if not everything, plenty of cargo for a single song.