MOST PEOPLE RUN AWAY to the circus looking to be free – free of restraints, free of family. Will Oldham, aka Bonnie Prince Billy, went there to bend not break, to be family.
This becomes clear on a Sunday night in Kentucky at 8.30, as Oldham – singer/songwriter of sometimes lugubrious manner but long settled in a field of Americana that balances dark and darker with striking moments of mottled light – is sitting with his six-year-old daughter, “Pops”, on his lap, each smiling at me, as the camera comes on.
Though this normally would be bedtime for her, she clambers off to eat dinner (soup), while he will munch on a pizza slice during the interview, both of them hungry because it’s been a long day, as part of a long weekend, at the circus. Yes, circus. No, that isn’t an opening for one of his more eccentric songs or my extended metaphor. Yes, they were at the circus together for two days. No, they weren’t watching, they were performing.
Oldham senior and junior – his wife, the artist Elsa Hansen, was there but as audience - had done five circus performances across the weekend, at Louisville’s American Turners Club, a 100+ years old social club doing indoor and outdoor sports, and circus training. Preparation for this had involved multiple weekends of compulsory attendance at training, so Sunday gigs for Oldham senior were right out as missing one week would mean being cut from the show.
In the show, the Oldham family routine alongside another 15 parent/child pairings, was about a minute and a half with father on his back and legs in the air spinning daughter around as she did headstands and the like perched there. For some people who go back with Oldham to his Palace Music days or the long history now of the bonnie “Prince”, it’s an image that may boggle the mind. But there had never been a question of Oldham not participating.
From having her sing on one of his recent albums, and appearing in a film clip in 2023, to father-daughter escapades on the circus mat, there is a commitment to not separating his art life from his family life. As he sings in Our Home, the buoyant final track on his newest album The Purple Bird, “There’s not that much to it, no real work at all/Leggo my ego and embrace my id/That’s how we make it our home”.
It’s an attitude that goes back a generation, or at least is explained by what happened a generation before. Specifically, with his mother who had been a teacher before staying home with the three boys while Oldham’s father worked as a lawyer. He has spoken before about his mother’s exploration of her creativity in painting and other artwork that she did at home and never showed to anyone outside, and I tell him about my own mother’s creative energies, also away from teaching, that she poured into painting and then writing she never showed anyone.
For both women – his died in 2020; mine is still alive – dementia intervened before their work was done or fully revealed, and their concurrent stories of constrained expression, in my head at least, seem to emphasise his song Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, especially the line “how can I grow old if I don’t know?”.
I can’t help wondering how watching her affected the way Oldham, who began as a teenage actor, most notably in John Sayles’ 1987 film, Matewan, before changing lanes to music in his early 20s, thinks about making art.
“I would think our mothers generationally share a certain …,” he says, his voice trailing off. “My mother didn’t grow up in a family of artists or an artistic tradition that she was aware of, and it took her a long time to understand that that was even a potential way that she could describe yourself. [This was] even as from the time I was eight or nine years old, the drive to express herself, even if it was to nobody, through painting or sculpture or drawing, and ultimately through writing and collage, was so strong.
“It was so powerful watching somebody create interesting, informed, mature pieces of art that were content rich. Absolutely content rich: it wasn’t just pretty things; a lot of it was not pretty things. To see somebody just doing it and not looking for any kind of reward: she was just compelled to do it.”
Oldham explains further that at the time he was watching this he had no context for it, no way to see her in reflection of others who had come before. “I can’t find books because you only read books about artists who showed their work, who were recognised,” he says. “So it was really kind of confusing to have this very communicative art – there were a lot of things being expressed in it and I was getting a lot out of it – but I couldn’t share it. I couldn’t show it to my friends or look in books to understand what I was experiencing.”
That must have created an interesting dynamic, or construction, in his head about what it means to make art.
“It did,” he says. “My dad went to work and he took his work very seriously, and he was admired for the way he took his work very seriously. They both cared about what they did: one the world cared about, which was he was a lawyer and they cared about that I know because for years after he died [in 2006] his clients would come up to me on the street [and say] he helped me a lot with my life, I really appreciated your father. Colleagues of his would stop me and say your father had a relative to the way he approached his practice that I’ve never experience with anybody. And he provided for all of us.
“Then my mom is doing this other thing … I’m still trying to figure this. Sometimes I’m angry at my dad, like why didn’t you teach me something normal? Why didn’t you bring me to your office and say, this is the law, this is what I practice, you could practice it too, and there would still be questions but it’s this wrestling.”
The last artwork she ever did ended up on the cover of his album with Emmet Kelly as The Cairo Gang, The Wonder Show Of The World. A piece of her work commissioned by him as “she wasn’t doing anything and I was like, Mom I need you to make something for me”.
“Her last regular [artistic] practice was something she called spiralling, so every morning she would spend a couple of hours doing stream-of-consciousness spirals, like mandalas, and she would create a narrative out of the mandala. She would look at the colours, look at the shapes and name the colours after characters that had existed for a couple of years for her, and should we describe how they were interacting. Wild things,” says Oldham.
“I said use primary colours, red, yellow and blue, and just go for it. Every day I would just like you to get back to your spiral practice. The things she came up with were very intense. Very intense. These faces started to show up in the mandala that she couldn’t explain because she couldn’t explain anything at that point: she could barely put three sentences together at that point. I got her to focus for about 10 days, that was it, and got about six usable pieces, and then she just stopped and never made anything ever again.”
A fascinating interaction of need and art and connection, if he or I or you can separate it from the fraught emotions around such a state of being.
“It’s so strange not having access when anyone that you love is alive but essentially inaccessible, then to know that there is a lot … I don’t know … that’s intense, this thing that you and I share.”
I tell him that my sisters and I knew that there was so much pain and frustration, among other things, in what our mother wrote because we could see it in how she was describing it to us, and how she became in the early stages of her dementia when she loosened the bounds of decorum and restraint that had kept all of this in.
Like Oldham’s mother, those feelings had been inside for decades, because that was the only place that she had. At least until art – painting, writing, expressing – offered an avenue, albeit a private one, a secret one, a personal circus to run to.
“Tell me what's wrong with me/And say it in a clear cold whisper/'Cause how can I grow old if I don't know?/Are you afraid to sing it?/See, keeping secrets will destroy you.”
TOMORROW: Will Oldham gets into the nitty and some of the gritty of making an album that pulls in the past but argues there’s space and good reason to revel in the present.
The Purple Bird is out now on No Quarter Records.
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APPLE MUSIC: Listen to Bonnie Prince Billy - The Purple Bird
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