Tomorrow in this very space you can read an interview with Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy (though the inverted commas have gone these days, disappeared in time like several of his earlier noms-de-guerre), talking about a new album – and mothers, and modern American, and country music, and more. That album is called The Purple Bird and it comes highly recommended.
Preparing the ground for the interview is Wind Back Wednesday’s return to 2012 and a Bonnie “Prince” Billy album (back when the inverted commas were in peak condition) that has several connections – in spirit and influence – with this new record. Alongside it, an album from a pair of fellow travellers, Tom Carter and Christian Kiefer.
It's Americana, but not as you always know it.
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BONNIE “PRINCE” BILLY
Lie Down In The Light (Spunk/EMI)
TOM CARTER AND CHRISTIAN KIEFER
From The Great American Songbook (Preservation)
"MY WORLD’S BEEN ROCKED before and it will be rocked again/By a tremor or a howling wind/And Lord if you demand, if the world at large asks of me/I will surrender to you."
Will Oldham, often known as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, has travelled down the grimmest and most sullied, and in their own ways most romantic, pathways of American life and music. His explorations of folk and country roots have been accompanied by tales replete with myriad ways we bring pain to each other.
Lie Down In The Light is not without these. But it is mostly, surprisingly, leaning towards some peace even in the bleakness, as the quote above, from Willow Trees Bend, demonstrates. Ok, it is not exactly full sunniness but there's hearth and home and heart bringing comfort.
In So Everyone, a stately and spare duet with Ashley Webber, he sings of how he and his "mountain girl" have "a new leaf to show the world, glad we do". In For Every Field There's A Mole, a loping cowboy-meets-Dixieland tune, he is positively buoyant (for him) as he declares "for every man who will last there's nothing he can't get past, no obstacle he cannot erase".
At his best, and the second half of this album in particular for me is getting right up there with Oldham's best, Oldham brings such ache, of both a good and a heartbreaking kind, to the songs that there is no line between pain and pleasure, it is all feeling and it is all living. That the album ends with eyes to the heavens, beautiful and uplifting in the simplest hymnal country style, is in its own way pure American roots, music and spirit.
Drawing on traditional American folk music, from Stephen Foster to blues, from ragtime to working man's songs, (all conveniently now out of copyright) Tom Carter and Christian Kiefer have gone straight to the source. But how they've approached the songs is anything but straight and the results can be both strikingly evocative and at times skin crawlingly disturbing.
This is the art house refracting a vision long thought to have been fixed in our culture. (Aided too by odd and oddly entertaining liner notes.)
Carter and Keifer's version of Scott Joplin's The Entertainer is something like The Necks playing Sonic Youth: sparse, built from almost nothing in what seems like made-up-on-the-spot intersections before a squalling, pressing on the bruise climax where for the first time the well-known piano figure emerges from within. By contrast, Camptown Races is reflective and pastoral, while the high country standard, Will The Circle Be Unbroken is a slowly unwinding mix of sounds which suggests squeezebox attached to a delay pedal and a collapsing church organ playing through a guitar amp.
Vocals appear periodically but the strength of this album is the sounds extracted from various instruments, sometimes natural, sometimes distorted and disguised, which put these songs of death, faith, murder and bastard entertainment in contexts new.
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