IN A PLAYLIST I made this past week I put Will Oldham’s new The Water’s Fine (from his Bonnie Prince Billy album, The Purple Bird) between Sammi Smith’s One Away From One Too Many, which the veteran country singer released in 1986, and the great Merle Haggard’s Mama Tried, that was released in 1968, around the same time that Smith, his fellow “outlaw country” rider, was approaching the peak of her career.
The songs feel as if they existed in the same neither old nor new time and space, the classic country stylings of the two old songs and the classicist form of a song written as part of new approach from Oldham, writing in partnership with some old hands of the Nashville scene. This playlist combination served to reinforce the argument that this new Bonnie Prince album is something that is not simply rooted in the past but genuinely connected to artists and songs that have moved him and elevated him.
“I think a lot about, for example a telephone,” says Oldham, from his Louisville, Kentucky home, where it’s dark, getting on in the evening, and still chilly. “I spent my childhood being instructed by elders on how to use the telephone, like what’s the proper protocol. They are instructing you but also you are learning by having short and long conversations with your friends, with your family, with the store, with the movie theatre, all these things. And then gradually technology advances and evolves and you are asked then to throw all that away. Everything you learnt about communication using this medium is absolutely worthless.”
This may sound like some old man shouting at the clouds diversion, but Oldham isn’t done yet.
“Similarly, with all due respect to new wave music and people who supposedly advanced with new kinds of music and new approaches to music, you think like, Are we done with the old music? I don’t think we are. I think we are learning and not only are we learning how the structure of the song might work or how the structure of a record might work, but also how the relationship between a radio listener and the song played on the radio works.
“I think, why are we so eager to ‘move forward’, progress! growth! progress!? We have not perfected any of these things that we have invented.”
If structure and sonics are not to be discarded or derided, then neither is an attitude that might get sneers from more seasoned or cynical types. That might once have been seen as outside the remit of Bonnie Prince Billy whose territory often incorporated houses of the debauched, the distraught and the evil alongside occasional visits to houses of the holy. But thinking that would be a mistake now as it was back in the day.
One of my favourite songs of Oldham’s, The Way, is the kind of gentle country song that exists to remind us that even at the hardest moments, tenderness is not something to fear, neither is forgiveness. The Purple Bird seems to operate on a similar basis, that there’s more to feel beyond the simplicities of anger or hurt or fear. Boise, Idaho – a song about bad behaviour, regrets and resolutions that politely mocks the idea of certainties – maybe sums that up best.
That’s a difficult attitude to present and to maintain at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Why did Oldham take this approach and how does he maintain it for himself?
“I feel, specifically even in the past weeks bizarrely, I am experiencing a rare moment of balance and clarity, even as the world, maybe because the world isn’t. It’s sort of like when the pandemic happened: there was a strong part of me that felt, well, at least now because I have a tendency to approach every day with an overarching sense of urgency [which he has attributed to the ripple effects of his father’s sudden death in 2006, and the sense of a life incomplete that gave him], now the rest of the world will catch up with me and we’ll have something to talk about,” he smiles wryly.
“But having experienced certain kinds of crises, as a witness and as a far-from-willing active participant, and feeling unheard, that dynamic is something that has sat with me very powerfully, so that my driving making music has been a drive of connection. And it’s a drive of emotional, intellectual connection that the intention is to draw people, to corroborate points of view and emotions that are unrecognised and unrewarded generally. In modern day today at the very least.”
What are these unrewarded emotions?
“I feel that Boise has this obvious climax moment when the voice singing the song says I’m confused and I don’t know why I’m going back to Boise Idaho, and there is so much confident pronouncements that people almost seem to feel a responsibility to lead with. If not to just disguise themselves in confident pronouncements,” he says. “A lot of people feel that way, a lot of people don’t have complex or conflicting ideas about reality and personal relationships. I’m not one of those people.”
Instead he puts himself in the category of people much derided now by those in charge of media and technology and what’s left of government. “People who have a lot to offer, people who are going to be a kind of societal glue and relational glue because they/we see strengths and faults equally, but because we are – I won’t even say willing, but maybe vulnerable to the constant recognition of faults and contradictions, that can feel overwhelming.” And he’s ok with that.
“Because you look around and you see others are not moved by the power of contradiction, they are not moved by the power of weakness. So I feel like approaching music through this idea of creating community through the identification of community that is inherent and ignored as a potential resource. There are certain kinds of connectivity between human beings that, on a very basic level is inconvenient for media or systems because it’s complex.
“We live, in the United States, in this terrible capitalist society and capitalism is a handy way of saying, well we can move forward if we look at the bottom line, and it has so little to do, obviously, with what it is to be alive and a thinking, reasoning organism.”
Uncertainty is annoying, uncomfortable and interfering for systems and for people who know for sure, who have no doubts. The kind of people maybe who would see a song on his new album called Guns Are For Cowards and bristle.
That said, the jaunty Guns Are For Cowards is funny, then ridiculous, then profound – a kind of inverse pattern to what is happening around us. The kind of world that could do with its own The Best Troubador, his 2017 album of Merle Haggard songs that focused on later and happier songs in the great man’s catalogue. Maybe The Purple Bird, an album whose songs came out of collaboration at every stage, is it.
“I mean it’s nice to think that it has. I think part of the joy of making it, from the very first time sitting down for a co-writing session, especially since 2020 I have felt like making music should have agit-prop qualities. And finally, because of the worlds of, the dimensions of songwriting that were opened up through collaborating with the co-writers on The Purple Bird record, I felt okay, yeah, this is what I mean on some levels by agit-prop,” Oldham says. “Because it’s all deceptively simple, it’s all lyrical – like the lyrics are pretty, they are lyrics, song lyrics – and yet as each song began to take shape there is this realisation that the songs are going to be able to serve multiple purposes for anyone who has the opportunity to hear them.
“That’s been my fantasy from day one of trying to make music: to think that of course I want to make songs that resonate with people, but I really want to make songs that very, very specifically respond to a known or unknown need in the audience.”
Has he not done that before though?
“I know that over the years there are songs that do that, but usually in fairly obscure, more oblique ways because that’s just the way my brain works on its own, and the way maybe most people’s brains work on their own,” says Oldham. “Maybe it’s only in collaboration that we can find the common ground necessary to create something that resonates.”
We should not underestimate how much of the success of his achievements here towards that goal can be attributed to just how attractive this record sounds. It is so warm and accommodating, detailed but not overfilled, and just such a pleasure to listen to. Combine that with the lyricism and the emotional tone of these songs and you can see why they would insinuate Oldham’s subtle points into suspecting and unsuspecting listeners.
“Growing up, one of my big musical heroes was the late great Phil Ochs and over the course of talking about this record and talking about Guns Are For Cowards specifically, I started to think that oh, Guns Are For Cowards is my first Phil Ochs song,” he says. “But what you are saying also reminds me of when Ochs made his Pleasures Of The Harbor record [released at the height of the Vietnam War, in 1967], which has got a lot of saccharine string arrangements. It’s an overproduced record, but I think at the time he thought he was producing something that was very attractive and beautiful and if I remember right, the liner notes at the back he said something like ‘in such ugly times the only true protest is beauty’.
“And as much as I love Phil Ochs I don’t think he made the beautiful record that he thought he made, but I do think The Purple Bird has moments of musical beauty that are exactly ‘in these ugly times I want to do something for you’. I want to be a part of something that is as beautiful as I could possibly make it.”
The Purple Bird is out now on No Quarter Records
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