Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy
We meet Will Oldham in a Kentucky bookshop to discuss his first collection of original songs in eight years
As WILL OLDHAM returns as Bonnie “Prince” Billy with his first album of original songs in eight years, he meets Stephen Deusner in the recesses of a Kentucky bookshop. To discuss: an audiobook containing the “dirty parts” of his songs, octopus hunting in Hawaii, the joy of pseudonyms and more…
‘‘THE punchline comes first!” Will Oldham exclaims to the small crowd that has gathered in Morehead, Kentucky, to hear him read and sing from a new book of lyrics, Songs Of Love And Horror, and perhaps drop some hints about his new album, I Made A Place. “What’s the biggest problem with time travel jokes?” It takes a few beats for the audience to respond, but he gets a few chuckles. “I told that joke to my wife a few days ago, and she still hasn’t laughed. But the benefit of time travel is one day she will laugh, and it will have been a successful joke.” Oldham is on stage at Coffee Tree Books, an unusual space that suits the artist known to many fans as Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Built inside a renovated cinema, it features a coffeeshop in the lobby and rows of bookshelves lining the sloping floor leading up to the stage.
As he opens his dog-eared copy of Songs Of Love And Horror, which contains lyrics from throughout his nearly 30-year career, Oldham admits with no small trace of glee that he has no idea what to expect tonight. He doesn’t know which songs he’ll perform or which stories he’ll tell. Everything is left to chance. From his back pocket he removes his smartphone, which he displays to the audience the way a magician might show a handsaw or a top hat. “On this magic device that so many of us carry around, I found a random number generator, which I will use to determine what I will present to you tonight. Some of these songs I know backwards and forwards and can play them on guitar. Some I’ve never, ever been able to play on guitar. I don’t know what this device will make me sing. I don’t know what will happen.”
He presses a button and waits for the magic number. “291!” Oldham flips some pages and appears shocked to find a truly deep cut from his catalogue. “I can sing this, but I don’t think I can play it. It’s called ‘Trudy Dies’.” He explains that he wrote the song in order to turn something positive – a loving relationship with a woman whose name wasn’t Trudy – into something negative, as the title hints. It’s a love song as obituary, first appearing 25 years ago on an obscure EP under his early alias Palace Music. “I haven’t been sad now for so many years,” he sings, with no accompaniment, his voice loud but gentle, solemn but expressive, sorrowful yet reserved.
The next number is 286: “Tonight’s Decision (And Hereafter)”, from 1995’s Viva Last Blues. Before he sings, Oldham holds up his copy of Songs Of Love And Horror and explains that until recently it belonged to his friend David Berman, the mastermind behind Silver Jews and Purple Mountains, who died this past August. “David went through the entire book and highlighted every lyric that he thought had a sexual overtone… or undertone? Apparently he created an audiobook version, so I am anticipating an audio file of him reading just the dirty parts.” There is one line in “Tonight’s Decision” that was highlighted by Berman, and Oldham pauses his a cappella performance to point it out to the crowd: “When he comes for me, I will fuck him, o!”
Throughout his career Oldham has thrived on happenstance, serendipity, random chance, controlled chaos. He rejects setlists, tours, the rigamarole of the promotional cycle. Instead, he releases records on his own schedule; in fact, I Made A Place is his first collection of original songs in eight years. He prefers to live and perform in the present moment, always to be creating a new and unduplicatable experience, which has allowed him to survive upheavals in the music industry and become a hero to new generations of folk and avant-garde artists.
“I think he has spawned a generation of songwriters who measure themselves against him. I certainly do,” says his frequent singing partner and fellow Bluegrass Stater Joan Shelley. “And it definitely gives people a little pride here in Kentucky. He knows you don’t have to be in a major city to get the juice of life, and it’s encouraging to see somebody intentionally make his life different from other people’s.”
MIDWAY through the set, Oldham announces that he’ll be playing a new song called “Squid Eye”, from I Made A Place. The song is new, but its inspiration is several generations old. “I went to Hawaii in 1999 because it’s where my mom was born,” he says by way of explaining the song’s peculiar imagery. “My grandmother was a nurse at Hickam Field when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and she was mopping up blood in the hospital while she was pregnant with my mother. I completely fell in love with the place. And while I was there I picked up a book of short stories by a writer named Ian Mcmillan, who wrote about the spearfishers who would go out hunting for octopus – although they would call them squid, I guess because it’s easier to say. Octopi can hide themselves very easily among the coral and rocks, but if you can see them, you
have what they call the squid eye. When you look at anything, it takes a while for your eye to train itself and see what you really need to see.”
It’s a rambling introduction to a song that is, for Oldham, perhaps uncharacteristically sweet, upbeat and catchy. He picks out a spry theme on his acoustic guitar, then delivers a burst of playful lyrics, which imagine him as Aquaman’s kid, namedrops The Little Mermaid and boasts that he’ll “potty-train a Kodiak bear”. In one of his most genuinely ebullient choruses he declares, “I’ve got the eye for the squid! It ain’t not there, it’s just hid.”
It’s a pivotal song on I Made A Place, where it is festooned with lively bass saxophone and jazzy guitar licks. It is, like nearly all the songs on the album, “pretty happy and upbeat”, Oldham tells the audience at Coffee Tree, and those adjectives seem to surprise him. It’s not that he writes uniformly bleak or dreary songs, although his most popular composition is literally called “I See A Darkness”. It’s more that light and dark are constantly battling in his songs of love and horror, and I Made A Place is perhaps the first album where light has the upper hand on dark, where hope dashes horror.
He began writing it in a place many people might describe as a paradise. When he and his wife, Elsa Hansen Oldham, took an artistin-residency position at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, they lived in an old cabin on the lip of an active volcano. They had nothing to occupy themselves but creating art: songs for Will and sewing for Elsa (who is an esteemed embroidery artist). “I found with that time and space the only thing I knew how to do was make songs,” he says.
He flew back to the mainland with the raw material for I Made A Place, the way others might pack a lei or a snowglobe as a souvenir, but then set about working to turn those scraps into songs. More than two years later, you can hear that lush setting on “Look Backward On Your Future, Look Forward To Your Past”. Featuring Oldham singing and strumming what sounds like a tropical ukulele, it has the quiet communal spirit of a song you might sing around a campfire on the beach, but it speaks very specifically to island philosophies: “Get your sense of time from the ancient Hawaiians, your sense of self from the hydrogen blast.”
A close friend of the Oldhams and a renowned Louisville singersongwriter in his own right, Daniel Martin Moore was among the first to hear the tune, as he and Will recorded a set of spare demos. “There’s a new straightforwardness to these songs,” says Moore, “and I’m thinking of that line about the ancient Hawaiians: ‘Look backwards on your future.’ That’s how they saw time. The reason you can see the past is because you’re facing backwards as you move through time. You can’t see what’s behind you, which is the future. You can only see clearly what you’ve already done, because you’re facing the past. You’re walking backwards.”
Oldham brought that sensibility to those early demos, as he made sure each new performance was different from the previous one. “He’s very unpredictable,” says Moore. “Take after take, his harmonies would be different, his phrasing would be different. You never knew how he was going to deliver a line. It was always fresh and wild.”
“IDON’T have any music on my phone,” Oldham says as he bellies up to the bar at Sawstone Brewery, just next door to Coffee Tree. “It’s like eating where you shit… or maybe shitting where you eat? Why would you do that? If a telemarketer could call you and interrupt a song you’re listening to, why would you invite them? And yet, people do.” It is the beginning of a circuitous explanation for why he has waited nearly a decade to release a new album of new songs, although he has maintained a steady stream of odds-and-ends releases: rarities, reinterpretations, covers of himself and others. His most recent project was called When We Are Inhuman, a collaboration with Bryce Dessner from The National and the contemporary classical ensemble Eighth Blackbird. Oldham offers new readings of older songs like “New Partner” and “One With The Birds”, which sound newly complex now that he is nearly twice the age he was when he recorded them.
A young man wearing a Japanese Joy Division T-shirt introduces himself as the brewery’s owner and founder, and he buys Oldham’s first round. Before moving to Morehead, he was a biologist stationed on a remote island in the South Pacific, and Oldham – long accustomed to having strangers introduce themselves – briefly interviews him about his time among the tropical birds. Soon he returns to the subject at hand: his own years in the wilderness.
“I don’t know how to give something to an audience if that’s the model, if they’re willing to let streaming services define their listening. So in the interim I made the Mekons record and the Susanna record and the Merle record [see side panel], knowing that I can’t wound or maim or destroy those songs. They’re already too good, so I can make those records and maybe those songs can help me learn to understand how people are approaching music without putting a song that is untested into the waters.”
That uncertainty predates his sojourn in Hawaii and the first notes of these new songs, and it has preoccupied his mind ever since, to the point where he wondered if he could ever feel comfortable releasing new songs into the world. In 30 years he has seen new pop fads emerge and then fade, new listening technologies develop and define music for new generations. In the 1990s, when he was working under the Palace moniker, he crafted ornate packaging for his first CDS and 7in singles, filling the sleeves with art that always enlarged the world of the songs. He’s an artist who appreciates the physicality and therefore the permanence of music, who understands CDS and LPS might be the artefacts to be unearthed by future generations. When a civilisation stops producing artefacts, can anything survive?
This is more than just a curmudgeon shaking his fist at kids today. Rather, Oldham’s misgivings about the market for music represent the existential quandary of an artist who values his work dearly, as if the songs were his children. “They were getting closer and closer to resembling real songs, and thus they were getting closer and closer to resembling a record. I realised I couldn’t rewrite them any more. What am I supposed to do now?” Even as he sank deeper and deeper into cynicism about digital music, Oldham knew that simply shelving the songs was out of the question. “Part of what makes a song a song is having somebody hear it. I realised I care for them so much that I didn’t not want to allow them that opportunity to be heard.”
“I remember him saying that he didn’t think he was ever going to make another record of his own songs, new songs,” says Nathan Salsburg, the Louisville guitarist who bonded with Oldham years ago over their mutual obsession with Alan Lomax (Salsburg is the curator for the Lomax Archive). “What’s the point? Will seemed like he had moved past the concept of making albums, writing and recording songs, compiling them on records, touring – all the things a lot of us feel obliged to do.”
And there were other responsibilities tugging at him. Shortly after they returned from Hawaii, Will learned that Elsa was pregnant. “She’d had two miscarriages but we kept moving forward, cautiously optimistic. My primary job was to make sure my wife was healthy, and that takes some time and effort. She couldn’t fly, so I decided I wasn’t going to travel. And the baby was growing.” Rather than stifled and restless, Oldham found himself energised and inspired by his new role. When their daughter was born in late 2018, she became the first real audience for these songs. “She had heard them in utero, and then I was playing them every day during her first months. She was waking up at four in the morning, so I was waking up and thinking: no problem, let’s go downstairs and work on songs together. I would put her next to me and work through the songs. It felt like they were on a parallel trajectory with her.”
EVENTUALLY the new father realised that the songs were as finished as he could make them and that it would take the input of others to complete them. So he called up Salsburg and Shelley, but kept them in the dark about his intentions (if he even knew what they were). “We learned the songs as a trio, sang them and worked them out together,” says Shelley.
“Will has all these schemes to surprise the consumer side of the music industry. There was talk that he might even make two different records.”
“His new songs sounded so humane,” says Salsburg. “They were marked with a humour and warmth. I don’t want to say they were simple, but they were straightforward, with a quiet, comfortable satisfaction that I think he is experiencing in his life right now. That comes across beautifully in these songs.”
Oldham booked time at Downtown Recording in Louisville, where he had done only a few overdubs for other artists and voiceover work for a local documentary filmmaker. To the core trio of himself, Salsburg and Shelley, Oldham added drummer Mike Hyman, bass player Danny Kiely and multi-instrumentalist Jacob Duncan. They had been backing him as part of the band dubbed The Wandering All-stars & Motor Royalty, with whom he had toured briefly in 2018. (Their name, he explains, derives from a film Oldham loved as a teenager, The Bingo Long Traveling All-stars & Motor Kings, about Negro League baseball players.) Together, they created wild new versions of his old songs, injecting them with jazz, klezmer and big-band sounds.
Much of the spirit of that project made it onto
I Made A Place, in particular the burbling saxophone and flute. “Most of the album was cut live, with Will in the same room as the band,” says Duncan, who wrote horn arrangements for most of the new songs. “That’s something I don’t usually run into – a singer singing live with the band. But he just did it. He was really in the moment. He trusts everybody, but he also trusts that spirit of: who knows what’s going to happen? That’s the beauty of working with him. It’s challenging. He makes you grow as a musician and keeps you on your toes as a human being.”
Oldham emerged from Downtown Recording with something new inhis catalogue, something
perhaps even he didn’t expect. “I See A Darkness was a really joyful release for understanding how music worked and what I could do with it. ‘Oh, there’s all this possibility here. Anything can happen.’” It was such an epiphany that he invented a new persona for the 1999 record, a new stage name: he jettisoned the Palace alias and rechristened himself Bonnie “Prince” Billy.
“This record felt very similar to that experience, to the point where I wondered, should I create a new name entity? David [Berman] had done that with Purple Mountains, and I’m glad he did that. But then I realised that people will talk about that. That’s why I quit fucking with names in the 1990s, because that’s all people talked about. The point is that you don’t talk about it. You focus on what’s inside the record.”
“IUSED to make a lot of records in Shelbyville,” Oldham says, pointing to a highway exit sign off I-64. After beer and a quick bite, he’s eager to get back home to his wife and daughter in Louisville, and it seems like every small town holds some bit of Bonnie “Prince” Billy lore. In Lexington there is a local radio show called Woodsongs Old-time Radio Hour, which he recently played with Joan Shelley. In Oldham County, he explains, there is a statue of an ancestor of his, a Revolutionary War hero, although it looks suspiciously like Oldham himself.
But Shelbyville is special. A lot has happened in this rural community. “I used to live in this farmhouse in Shelbyville with my younger brothers, and that’s where I made I See A Darkness. I still have the old upright piano that I played on that album.” It’s also where he filmed the video for his 2018 single “Blueberry” (“because my friend had a blueberry farm”) as well as the video for “At The Back Of The Pit”. Over the past few years he has made a concerted effort to get back out to these small towns, to play more shows in Kentucky.
I Made A Place is not really a break from the past that lingers out here in the Kentucky countryside, but something closer to a record of a new stage in Oldham’s life, of the new role of husband and father he has taken on. It is a vantage point from which he can look back on his future and forward to his past. It subtly changes how everything that came before it sounds.
“Often I think about my relationship to music and realise I harbour a significant amount of – to use a predictable word – darkness. But one of the functions of music is that it can be something like a vaccine. In order to get that darkness out, you have to inject a little bit of controlled darkness into somebody’s system. You don’t want it to grow and become a full-fledged disease. You just want to use it so that you and the listener can create antibodies that can live around that darkness and not be destroyed by it. Maybe at this point I’ve done enough of that. Maybe I’ve created a safe biome and now it’s time to work on actually doing something with it. What do I want to do now that I’ve made a place?”
I Made A Place is released by Domino on November 15. When We Are Inhuman is available now on 37d03d