Will Oldham a.k.a. Bonnie ‘Prince Billy’, working also under monikers like ‘Palace Brothers’, is a character well known to all fans of raw, sometimes punky, often pessimistic and haunted Americana. As he himself admits in this interview, he doesn’t know where he is, when he’s playing music. This January he released his newest album – The Purple Bird – and he’ll be performing in Warsaw on 20 and 21 May [buy tickets here]. Listen to what he has to say about the act of creation, his music and misticism.
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So, counting The Purple Bird, that has just come out, you’ve recorded over 20 albums, both solo and with other artists. Does it make writing new stuff easier? Or quite the opposite, it’s more difficult, because you’re trying to do something new?
It’s easier, for the most part it’s easier to write and record. Still it’s shockingly difficult at times, especially recording, because once you figure out how to do something, then, if you want to carry it further, there are new, unforeseen challenges and obstacles.
Could you name few obstacles you’ve met, while recording The Purple Bird?
The wonderful thing about this record is that it was atypical, it was the most obstacle free record I’ve ever been involved in. We’ve started recording about a year ago. Now I’m working on another record and there are fresh obstacles, but there were almost no obstacles while working on The Purple Bird. The only obstacle was that before the recording session my daughter accidentally stuck a thumb in my eye and scratched my cornea. I was supposed to drive to Nashville to record the next day, and I just couldn’t, tears would just pour down and it was painful. But Ferg, who produced this album, sent some kid from Nashville in some fancy Pontiac, who just chauffeured me down to Nashville.
Okay, so if there were no creative obstacles during recording this album, maybe you could name some, that you’ve encountered in the past?
Yeah, so we’re going into session now, for this new record as I’ve mentioned. And so I haven’t recorded with a bass player for a few years now, except for The Purple Bird, and so I asked a guy with whom I’m making a new record, and asked if he could recommend a bass player. He traced a guy who’s a cellist, but he’s playing bass on another woman’s record, and he said this guy is fun to work with. So we brought him in, he plays a few songs and it’s beautiful. The next week he comes back and for some reason it doesn’t work. And he says, he’s not a bass player, he’s a cellist. And here we are, halfway through tracking him, and it doesn’t work at all. I’m not his bass guitar coach, or anything like that, so I’m thinking that maybe this relationship has come to its logical conclusion at this point, but he’s a wonderful person and a great musician, but there’s no way of moving forward, making songs like that. There’s a bit of pain involved, when needing to dismiss this person, as well as confusion as to what to do now, but also a confusion about what to do next, since I’ve got half of the record ready and I need a bass on another half.
Do you compare your latest records to the old ones?
Again, The Purple Bird is an outlyer, it’s a different kind of record, strange record. And I’m thinking this feels like Ease Down The Road crossed with Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You. So I do think about those things, because it helps me, you know, remember that I’m not working in a vacuum, that I don’t need to start from the scratch. And that if I need to search my memory for creative decisions that I’ve made before, they’ll be there. And it helps to figure out how can this song find its life and to realize that there were songs before, that may be logical predecessor to what I’m working on now.
So it’s kinda like solving puzzles, but you’ve got some pieces from the past?
Exactly.
So you’ve mentioned that The Purple Bird is a special record. Could you explain why?
I made this record Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You in 2021, and it came in 2022. And then I was down to working on new record, when I called my friend, David „Ferg” Ferguson, and told him that I wanted to visit him, just as a friend. So he asked „why don’t I set up a songwriting session”, which is a thing in Nashville, it’s what songwriters do, they get up, look in the calendar, oh I’m supposed to write a song now, and they go and do it. And I’ve never done that before, but he said he’ll set up appointments. I was thinking about this as other record, that sounded kinda like distraction, but maybe also a fun thing to do with a friend. And so we did a few sessions and to everyone’s pleasant surprise, they went very well. So he said, that he’ll come back in few weeks and we’ll do it again, with co-writers. This just had this wonderful chemistry, energy, momentum. And Ferg is a somebody, who likes to be alone, but music is what makes him involved with other people. And I’m kinda introverted myself, I don’t really hang out with my friends, even though I should. And there we were, doing something, and it meant that we could spend time together, making something. And it felt so good, songs felt very strong, so we decided to set up a recording session. Ferg said, that he’ll do it, he’ll get the best band aviable in Nashville. And that’s what he did. I guess the closest thing to this record is „Bonnie Prince Billy sings greatest Palace music”, which came out in early 2000s, where my friend Mark Nevers, who’s a producer from Nashville, put me in a studio with an incredible list of session musicians. So I knew the ropes, I wasn’t coming in completely blind, and one of the musicians was the same as then, a guy named Stuart Duncan, who plays fiddle and mandolin. They’re kinda wizards, their abilities are uncanny, to hear a song one time, and then in combination with listening to featured artist singing, and follow the vibe microsecond by microsecond and push a song to a new place. So we’ve tracked 12 songs in 2 days, we did all the instruments in just 2 days, which is amazing, then came back few weeks later, to do the harmony vocals and other missing parts. Usually I make all the phone calls, in this case I didn’t do any of that, Ferg did all of that, which takes a big burden off your brain and allows you to Focus on music. The Purple Bird just flowed on, because Ferg acted as a producer, so I could just be an artist, and it felt incredibly liberating, to be involved with a record in that way.
So I guess it’s really important to surround yourself with talented people.
It’s more than half of a job, to work with people, who are better than you, at doing almost everything.
That moves us naturally to the next question I wanted to ask you. You’ve been known for Your DIY aesthetics, that is mostly associated with punk music. But in one of your recent interviews I’ve found an interesting quote, that „country music is about sharing”. So is it something that you had to learn? I mean this sharing, working with others.
Punk music ideally is also about sharing, it’s populist music, punk music and country music at its best is a populist music. I circumstantially spent my early childhood, well in a kind of isolation. And so I was always looking out and idealizing and dreaming about being with other people, working and living with other people. I started doing theater things, when I was about 8-9 y.o., and when I was ten, I joined theater school, that had an improvisation aspect to it. And then within a couple of months I had a call on Thursday, saying that Saturday morning we’re gonna go and do an improv performance for a group of kids. And so I went, I was working with older kids, and right then, we were all creating this show out of nothing, because it was improv. And that moment I realized, what I wanted to do, that I wanted to be involved in this urgent, at this moment creation of something, based upon practice and preparation and skill and intention, but then in combination with other people, you can only work with other people, there is no individual that is more important than any other individual, and everyone knows, when something has failed, and everybody knows, that something has succeeded. And this has become sort of my motto for the rest of my life.
Okay, and could you name one of the valuable experiences, that you’ve shared through music, the feeling, that there’s something special going on, while working with other musicians? Or maybe it’s a constant feeling, that you have, when you play and work on music?
Well, the goal is for it to be constant feeling. A good example would be, a situation when a guy I knew, who ran a record label, had heard that I’ve one time, maybe being a little bit drunk, in the wilds of Ireland, one night had improvised a performance of Bruce Springsteen song Thunder road. And he was a big Bruce Springsteen fan, also a Chicago guy. He asked me if I wanted to make an EP with a band Tortoise, and record Thunder Road and whatever other song you choose. I knew most of the people from Tortoise, as friends or acquaintances, but we’ve never done any sort of work together, but we went in to record 14 songs for this proposed EP. It was absolute joy, being together in a recording studio, realizing that we had nothing to loose, no one of us had to write songs, it was all about interpretation. Which made mistakes lower, because it was all about how for we can go, what can we do, while retaining the core Energy of the song, but then push it to its outer limits of whats possible with those songs, and have it still function as a song, that it is. That was one of a happiest recording projects I’ve been involved in. Mostly because I was working with such brilliant people. We were supposed to do just 4 songs, but we did the 4 songs, and then called the record guy, telling him that we wanted to keep going. He was like „I don’t have a money, I don’t want to do this!” but we told him, that we’d do it anyway, and we did. Because we were just having a ball.
Okay, and since you mentioned Tortoise, and it’s a band related to Louisville, because David Pajo was in it, let me ask you about Louisville. How much of an impact this city and its scene had on your music?
Massive. Absolutely massive. There was just such an exciting, vibrant supportive community of music makers, that I’ve started to hear about from my older brother, when I was like 10 or 11, and he was about 13, but already going out to clubs, forming bands, hanging around with older guys. He was coming home and telling me these magical stories about how great it is, how cool these people are. And when I met the people he was talking about, I just had to agree. They were just amazing, creative people, surrounded by people, who supported this kind of activity. By the time I was 14 or so, the big part of Louisville punk and art music scene was cross-pollinating with the Chicago scene specifically, even though it was about 5 hours drive away. There were great things were happening in Chicago, and for some reason there was a recognition of a mutual ground. Bands from up there were coming down to play in Louisville, and Louisville bands were going there, so it kinda becomes an extension of our musical landscape. And it’s still remained. Last night, when I was down by the river, there was a steamboat race, by the river. And there was some sort of blue collar social club, and there was a country band playing, and during a break between sets a drummer saw and recognized me, and he came down and asked me if I wanted to join them, because they were going to play my Ohio River Boat Song. And I thought it was a great idea. It’s just, knowing that you don’t necessarily feel like an outsider, if you’re an independent minded music person here. I can imagine communities, where you’d feel like a freak, and you don’t feel like a freak here.
So the scene in Louisville is still alive and well?
Still alive and well, yeah.
And there are new, exciting bands around?
Yeah, there’s the one called Copiers, they’re just putting in their third record and they’re awesome. There’s a lot of good music here.
There’s a famous slogan about Louisville – keep Louisville weird. Somehow music from this city, your music, fits it well.
Yeah, I think there were certain people, who were trying, with good intention, to label Louisville’s unique qualities, so that the population at large might come to support and understand this interesting identity that Louisville has. But at the same time they were trying to brand it as „keep Louisville weird”, and it’s counterproductive.
Are you still in touch with some of the guys from, let’s say, Slint? You’ve mentioned David Pajo before…
Well, David Pajo is a weirdo, and stopped talking to me like 2 years ago, and I don’t know why. But anyone who observes his professional and personal life, understands, that he’s a complicated person. But yeah, with Brit, Brian and Todd (the other 3 of Slint’s band) I’ve communicated with them and seen them in the past few weeks. So we’re still regularly in touch.
Do You consider yourself a spiritualistic person, or maybe fascinated with mysticism?
Kind of. I’m fascinated with mysticism, but I increasingly have something that I call an understanding that mysticism as most subjects that people are trying to grapple with, using language, is inadequate. It’s beginning of something, that humans who have explored mysticism have gone admirably far, although fortunately there seems to be a barrier in terms of… you know, when we reach certain kind of understanding there seems to be unfortunate barriers to passing on that experience and that information, generationally and even within community. And I think it’s just because, as humans we are smart enough to know a lot of things we don’t know, but there’s as far as we can go, because we don’t have brain capacity to understand things, that we don’t understand.
Yeah, thtre are just some things that are beyond us, right?
Absolutely. A lot of things are beyond us. Mysticism and other valiant explorations of underexplored forces, that control or unite or motivate us, inspire us, and yet we’re also trying to apply language and reasoning to these forces, which immediately limits what we could potentially understand about them, because they obviously exist far outside of language and pattern though structures.
I wanted to ask you about that, because many of your songs have this haunted, nocturnal vibe, and I wanted to know if it’s difficult to create it?
Yes, it’s really difficult. But I’m happy, that it’s my job, because I’m compelled to do it, and it being my job forces me to try harder, to locate, explore and to skirt the line of definition and in definition when talking about these things, or expressing them, because the great thing about singing is that you have melody, dynamic, vocal timbre, timing, you can use them to explore a lot of what language fails to be able to explore.
And do you have your special way, a method to catch this vibe during a recording session or live show?
It’s juxtaposition, it’s triangulation, so if it’s playing live, it’s working with musicians the way we align with each other, how we communicate with each other and with audition, and the songs we choose to play. But very specifically, the grouping of people is intended to convey and facilitate the creation of kinds of communication I guess? So that it’s happening. When making a record or performing live, I value the act of creation being witnessed and participated in by musicians as well as audience. And even when recording, the magic of recording gear is that it’s able to capture like a camera, a camera capturing the finish line of the race. So you capture, and you hear, you hear people struggling or coming to a moment successfully, and you can listen to this moment again and again, so you can align your own trajectory with what you hear in these recorded moments.
Do you feel there’s a difference in performing in USA and Europe? Because country or even folk music isn’t as popular here.
Yes. There’s an advantage to that. I play around in things that can be identified superficially as country or folk music, but it doesn’t really describe what I do. Here often there’s misplaced sense of understanding of what’s going on, because people may recognize the vernacular thing, and they think they know exactly where they, so you have to work twice as hard to reassure them, that they don’t know where they are, because I don’t even know where I am in this situation. So if you know where you are, when you listen to music I play, then you know more then I do. Which doesn’t seem quite right. And in Europe there’s lack of familiarity with sounds, chord progressions, or linguistic expressions, that allow people to look at things without that baggage.
Just before this interview, I’ve listened to a phenomenal cover of your song „I See a Darkness” by Rosalie. Is there an interpretation of your song, that especially touched you? Or one, you find especially creative?
I’ll state the obvious, which is Johnny Cash singing „I See a Darkness”. Because it represented this unforeseen intersection of dream life and real life, because it’s a kind of thing, you may find dreaming about. And it’s also when I met Ferg, who was in the room, when Cash sang this song. The relationship of these two allowed them to be in the room together, and then, 25 years later, it allowed me to be in the room and make music with Ferg. So it was extremely impactful. And hearing his voice sing these words… it was unbelievable.