Bonnie Prince Billy - Will Oldham on Bonnie Prince Billy

WILL OLDHAM ON
BONNIE PRINCE BILLY

Will Oldham is a singer songwriter and actor, and a native of Louisville, Kentucky.

Alan Licht , guitarist, has appeared on over seventy-five recordings that range from indie rock to free improvisation to minimalist compositions. He is the author of Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories , and a frequent contributor to Artforum , Wire , and many other publications. He lives with his partner, vocalist Angela Jaeger, in New York.

WILL OLDHAM ON
BONNIE PRINCE BILLY

edited by Alan Licht

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK LONDON

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

They [interviews] have nothing to do with the music. Its usually people asking a bunch of weird questions like, Why are the songs so slow? Well, maybe because they are. Because thats how we play them. Because I wrote them at a less rapid pace. Its always why, why, why? Why everything? And the answer to why is because it just is. Things just are.

Will Oldham, Observer, November 17, 2002

To longtime followers of the medias encounters with Bonnie Prince Billy/Will Oldham/Palace, the appearance of this book may come as something of a surprise. Look at almost any article about the singer/songwriter/actor from the last two decades and you will find words to the effect that its subject is an elusive, puzzling, and obfuscating artist who does not like to be interviewed, and is often evasive when he is. So, why would Oldham agree to do a book-length interview? One reason is to answer questions about his past in a single volume, to provide a basic information source for future interlocutors to consultand maybe so he wont have to do so many interviews.

The facts are these: Will was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 15, 1970 (not December 24, as some profiles would have it), the second of three sons. Up until the age of nineteen he pursued acting vigorously, appearing in local productions and a few television movies ( Umbrella Jack , starring John Carradine [1984]; Everybodys Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure [1988]) and feature films ( What Goes Around , directed by Jerry Reed [1982]; Matewan , directed by John Sayles [1987]; A Thousand Pieces of Gold , directed by Nancy Kelly [1989]). Suddenly disillusioned with acting, but a lifelong fan of music, he was encouraged to sing and make songs by friends and, particularly, his older brother Ned, and initiated an ad hoc group called Palace Flophouse (after the locale in John Steinbecks novel Cannery Row ). This turned into Palace Brothers, and as the Chicago indie-rock label Drag City began to release their records the name would change with each onePalace Music, Palace Songs, or simply Palaceas would the participants involved (who, until 1994s Hope EP, were generally uncredited). There were also no songwriting credits at first, and as little information given as possible on each releasewhich, combined with Oldhams reluctance to tour or to give interviews, is how he started to get tagged as an enigma.

The first four Palace albums that originally brought him attention There Is No One What Will Take Care of You , Days in the Wake , Viva Last Blues , and Arise Therefore remain a vital, high-contrast body of work. In the aftermath of Arise Therefore , Oldham retired the Palace moniker and seemed to be at a low ebb; one record made in collaboration with the Dirty Three was scrapped, and Joya , a reworking of some of the same material released in 1997 under his own name, almost went unrecorded entirely. The next year Bonnie Prince Billy was created, an appellation that Will has used for recording and performing ever since, and the following album, I See a Darkness , yielded some of his strongest material (the title track was later covered by Johnny Cash). Subsequent releases Ease Down the Road , Master and Everyone , The Letting Go , Lie Down in the Light , and Beware have retained the light-and-dark thematic concerns of the Palace records, each building on its predecessor in terms of recording, performances, and songwriting (2004s Bonnie Prince Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music , which re-dressed old Palace songs as straight country material with a crack Nashville session band, is a particularly intriguing recent disc).

In some ways the moniker Bonnie could be viewed as an accommodation with Oldhams growing success: rather than sign with a major label or settle on one backup band or sound, the decision to stick with one name does provide a certain stability lacking in the Palace era. But this remains the exception rather than the rule: Will questions and usually outright rejects any and all accepted record-industry wisdom with regard to virtually every aspect of the production, merchandising, and promotion of his music and himself. As much as, if not more than, long-standing rock-industry mavericks like Neil Young, Bob Dylan, or Lou Reed, Oldham is a law unto himself.

Emerging from the indie-rock scene of the early 1990s, Palace was at times lumped in with the No Depression alternative country-rock bands like Son Volt or Uncle Tupelo, or with the lo-fi movement identified with Sebadoh, Daniel Johnston, Guided by Voices, or Drag City labelmate Smog, and later Bonnie Prince Billy was occasionally held up as a forebear of the freak-folk scene of the past decade. Yet the music is too slippery for such simple categorizations. It touches onrefracts, reallyrock, pop, folk, country, bluegrass, and ethnic music without hybridizing any of them. Like Oldhams vocal delivery itself, which has deepened and developed from cracked and adenoidal to idiosyncratic but assured, the music is continually evolving, and in concert the old songs are reworked from tour to tour and often from night to night. The music is sometimes characterized as dark, which it can be, but it can also beeven in the same songbright, fun-loving, sly, bawdy, or cockeyed. The lyrics speak both to the joy (and struggles) of community and the pleasures (and struggles) of solitude.

Another part of the presss codification problem is that Oldham has never fit the singer-songwriter mold. As a mutual acquaintance put it in an email to me, I still see Will more as a film-maker without film than a musician. Which is not to say that the music conjures up sweeping CinemaScope vistas or resembles a movie soundtrack (although Oldham has scored some short independent films), but each album and tour is written, directed, and cast (or produced, as he will note herein) by Oldham. He has referred to his songs as little scripts that he hands out to the players and engineers during recording sessions, and has lamented that hed like his records to be filed in a record store by name, as a DVD would be in a video store, rather than by artist (hence the numerous iterations of the Palace name on early releases).

He is also often confused with the voice on the record or the figure onstage. The songs are not confessional; when religion, animals, royalty, family, travel, death, sex, riding, friends, or the wind keep reappearing in the lyrics, its like a painter returning to the same subjects, not another scene from the life of Will Oldham. In reading past Palace/Bonnie press coverage, I was reminded of soap-opera stars recalling people approaching them in an airport or a restaurant and chastising them for something their character did in the show, and having to explain to them, Thats not me. Indeed, there was one Bonnie show in Belgium where two fans came up to Oldham afterwards and said, You looked like you were having fun up there, and thats not what we came to see.

My own association with Will goes back to the early 1990s. A fellow named Ken Katkin released a single by my band, Love Child, in 1990. Ken was (then) a New Yorker, but a big fan, and friend, of Louisville indie-rock bands, also releasing singles by the Babylon Dance Band and King Kong. Love Child played in Louisville several times, and on a stop there during a US tour in spring 1993 we stayed with Ethan Buckler, King Kongs leader, who took us to a party at a house shared by Will, Pavements Bob Nastanovich, and Britt Walford (a veteran of both King Kong and of Slint, a band Ethan had once played bass in). Ken had mentioned Will to me a few times as someone who was not a musician but who was involved in the Louisville music scene, renowned, he said, for having appeared in John Sayless Matewan (a movie I had, at the time, never seen), taking the cover photo of Slints album Spiderland , and opening for Steve Albinis just-postBig Black outfit Rapeman at CBGBnot playing music, but making anal breathing sounds with his butt. Will was a fan of Love Child, and we had previously spoken briefly at one or more of our shows. At one point during the party Will and I found ourselves in the kitchen, and he asked me if I had a job besides music. I did, working at Kino International, a foreign- and independent-film distribution company in New York (ironically, a dozen years later, after I had left, Kino would distribute Kelly Reichardts Old Joy , Oldhams return to acting). This proved to be of great interest to him, and for the next hour we talked, mostly about film distribution and movies in general. Later, as I was walking out the door, he handed me a 7" recordOhio River Boat Song, the first Palace single. This was a surpriseneither he nor anyone else had said anything about it.