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Will Oldham is supposedly a man of darkness. The character that emerges from press linked about the web is a mysterious and quiet soul hiding behind odd, royalty-evoking monikers like Palace, Palace Music, Palace Brothers and, since the late ‘90s, Bonnie “Prince” Billy.
Oldham’s musical landscape is emotionally serrated. Its topography can be murderous, heart-achingly tender, joyous, sad, perverted and uninhibited. He takes some textural cues from the warm rusticity of very old American folk and the freeform dirt of ‘80s indie-rock. Live, he often unbuttons the soft, brooding innards of his records. Wild, wooly and shaggily-mustachioed, like a blonde Yosemite Sam grown to an average height, he yelps and howls over ramshackle country rock.
He is known for shunning the music-industry-as-usual. He tours when and how he feels like it. He books shows in non-major-markets like Laramie, Wyoming, or non-traditional venues like churches and record shops, or simply around good camping spots. He records often — in different locales with a revolving cast of conspirators. Most songs are recorded in just a few takes. Compared to other artists, he rarely gives interviews. Music journalists, when they do get access, often color over cryptic answers with adjective-heavy character sketches: backwoods solipsist, recluse, nomad.
“I See a Darkness” is perhaps Oldham’s best-known song. The track, with its protagonist, who exposes bleak visions like he’s expelling demons from his chest, was covered The Man in Black, Johnny Cash in 2000 (with Oldham singing backup). Cash, of course, added certifiable American mythology to an already heroically brutal song.
But, Oldham’s output cannot be defined by darkness alone. Perhaps like no other contemporary, he has persistently taken new chances while putting out consistently great work. His recent albums The Letting Go and Lie Down in the Light, have meditated more on love, communal joy and inner peace than ever before, but, characteristically, there is a tack on the chair: even a good day has awkward happenstance, even love illuminates humiliating urges. He’s also shown spontaneity and a diverse palate through cover songs. Though the picks sometimes read like jokes — Mariah Carey, R. Kelly, Danzig — through speakers, Oldham digs up the profound.
Matter Journal spoke with Oldham over the phone in the spring of ‘08 after the release of Lie Down in the Light, on Chicago-based independent label Drag City Records. From his home in Louisville, Kentucky, he talked about navigating the seas of lightness and darkness, finding wisdom through song, and how his princely persona is designed for heroic acts.
Matter Journal: Some of the Lie Down in the Light songs are fighting for a more hopeful perspective in the lyrical content than your songs used to. I get this idea that it might have, at least in the past, sometimes been easier to be bleak, and that to look on the positive side of things, maybe, takes more energy.
Will Oldham: It always takes energy to turn an idea into music, and keep it from being just the idea. The goal is that inherent in the effort to make the music, is an optimism, whether or not there is some kind of superficial bleakness or darkness. The very idea of expending creative energy, financial energy, time, on these things implies that there is something worthwhile about it all.
And the truth is, the default or the easy thing, if you relax into it, is darkness. And sometimes, the easy thing is light and positivity. And rather than trying to bend over backwards and kill yourself to create something that just isn’t part of your world at that moment, seems detrimental because during all that time of too much labor, you are not communicating. And to me, the main point is to communicate as often as possible, as deeply as possible, and as much as possible.
MJ: Yeah, I was listening to a Nick Cave interview and he said something along the same lines. He was reacting to this idea that he’d always been perceived early on as presenting a bleak or depressing outlook, but he said something similar in that it takes so much energy to put this stuff out and it’s so much more complex than that.
WO: Right. By putting something into these things…if it’s fatalistic content, supposedly bleak content, it’s being denied by the medium itself. And, the idea behind that is to be encouraging to anybody who shares some of those ideas. Because at the end of the day, sometimes you just feel like God put another anvil on your back and that the best thing to do would be to fall forward and let the anvil crush your ribs— just give it in right there.
But as long as there is some sort of harmony going on with another being, if another being is creating some music or conversation, even if it’s harmony about this momentary or permanent bleak existence, it can give color and nuance and vitality to something that seems like it would be inherently the opposite.
Like, there is no way you could make darkness fun; but there is. You can. And it doesn’t mean you have to give up…like the goth chics don’t have to let their roots grow out and get rid of their cheek piercings in order to enjoy themselves. You don’t have to change your worldview in order to be energetically engaged with this brief existence.
MJ: I’m interested in what you think about of the idea of songs being fables, the idea that a good song should teach you something.
WO: Yeah, that’s an ideal that I aspire towards. I have found, increasingly, as I get older, that a lot of the songs that are most important to me are songs that continue to teach me things, sometimes over the course of, God knows, maybe thirty years. Songs that I can enjoy on some level on the first listen at age 15 and then get more into it at age 23 and more into at age 35. And the listening experience is completely different, and I never could have gotten to this different level of listening if I hadn’t started with it a long time ago. But that ideally, that there are things put in there for your enjoyment and things put in there, ideally, for your edification. If it has legs, then you can one day get to the center of the tootsie pop.
MJ: It’s almost like being a philosopher in some ways. That might be too big of a word, but in some of your songs you are searching for wisdom.
WO: Right. Searching for wisdom, which, you know, almost by its definition can only come with time and experience. So searching for ways to endure until that wisdom is possibly showered upon you or revealed through intense polishing.
MJ: I’m wondering if you saw the movie I’m Not There.
WO: I haven’t seen it, no.
MJ: One of the main ideas there that I got from it is the work Dylan had to do to change; the work an artist has to do to find the ability to freely try new things. I’ve read that your Bonnie “Prince” Billy persona was made for that end, originally.
WO: Yeah.
MJ: What is the persona to you now?
WO: Well now, it’s kind of a parallel existence. In some ways it’s a parallel existence and in some ways it’s a full on myth world or fable world and in some ways it’s also like this alter ego superhero. And in that way it’s an amalgam of the different superheroes that I read about when I was a kid.
And when I was a kid, the best comics, if I remember right –because I haven’t read comics in a long time. But the best comics treated the juvenile reader with possibly undo respect and tried to make complicated relationships between the characters in the comic books. And so growing up I could take the concept of having more than one identity, necessarily, because of what you do. I feel like I had some basic education through comic books, and now to have multiple identities.
Because now I’m about to go on tour in a week or so. And most of my vocalization on any given day on a tour will be these songs will not be conversation. It will be singing these songs. And so, that can kind of mess with you. It can. It doesn’t with everybody. Maybe it doesn’t with Barry Manilow or Wayne Newton or Glenn Danzig or whoever, but it can mess with your sense of reality.
And so, knowing that at this point, I think I try to keep one eye on writing the songs in terms of thinking “okay, you know, you are going to live here, you are going to live in these songs, so be careful what you say and be careful how you say it.”
There was that movie that wasn’t very good with Ben Affleck. I think it was a John Woo movie based on a Phillip K. Dick story called Paycheck, I think, where his character knows he that is going to either travel into the future or have his mind erased. So he assembles a set of clues and puts them in a manila envelope and leaves them for himself in the future—so that in the future he can reconstruct what happened to him.
And in some ways, there’s a little bit of that going on in the songs, knowing that I am going to be giving myself basically into Bonnie’s way of being, that that will be kind of okay, and that there will be little reminders of what real physical humanity is like, hidden in there, hidden in amongst the songs as I’m singing them. So the re-entry back into the world of physical bleeding will not be as difficult it has been sometimes in the past.
MJ: So, with the superhero analogy, it’s a way of forcing yourself into something greater than you might normally be.
WO: Exactly, forcing it and also allowing it. Oftentimes I think we feel like we are capable of something, or we know we are capable of something that’s better than we would have imagined ourselves capable of. And, we hold ourselves back because there are so many reality checks. That makes the most sense to do, to say, “no, you can’t do that.” But the nice thing about music is that once you begin a song or once you begin a set, or once you begin a recording session or a time hidden away in writing, you can sort of shut out the reality checks and know that you’re not being something greater than you are capable of being. You’re not being something that is greater than you are meant to be. But you are actually giving yourself the chance to not constantly check yourself, inhibit yourself. Because you begin a song, and nobody is going to stop you until you end the song. And you realize, ‘okay, that’s a free space for me to say and do certain things. And I need to take advantage of all these little two to seven minute capsules of time to say all these things that I’ve always thought should be said in a way that I’ve always thought they should be said.’ And maybe someone else will be glad that this thing was localized in this way.
MJ: Going back to the search for wisdom in songs, and other people’s songs: I was impressed with the R. Kelly cover on the Ask Forgiveness EP. How much searching for wisdom do you do when it comes to R. Kelly-sized music? Because a lot of us might miss it if we are buying a lot of Drag City records.
WO: Yeah. I think a ton. A ton. Because I know that, to say R. Kelly specifically, I know that a lot of records that sell a lot, sell a lot because of the machinery behind them. Most pop records are sold because of the machinery behind them. And, probably a good percentage of independent records, they sell because of the current frame of mind, in addition to promo and advertising budgets and things like that. But, somethings don’t.
I was fascinated with the idea of Jimmy Buffet back in the ‘80s. Looking at the Rolling Stone magazine in the ‘80s, they would always have the top-grossing concert round-up. And, consistently through the ‘80s, the majority of those shows were Grateful Dead and Jimmy Buffet. And, neither Grateful Dead nor Jimmy Buffet had had hit records in years. And neither of them did you ever see any advertisements for their records, for their shows. These were phenomenons that were built by the fan base and maintained by the fan base. And maintained by a respectful relationship from those performers to their audience.
And I tried really hard to understand what it was about Jimmy Buffet that people clung to. And I could find little things that I could relate to. And I tried to really hold onto those because I wanted to know…I think people are awesome. People are great. People are for the most part smart. The reason they buy bad records that get a lot of push is just because they have lives. Most people don’t have time to filter out, “should I get this record? or should I get this record?” It’s more like, “I wanna get a record, I’m gonna get this record.” Because they are focusing their energy and their intelligence and their sensitivity on things more important to them than music at that time. But knowing that over the years, masses of people kept returning to Grateful Dead and Jimmy Buffet, I kept thinking there’s got to be something there. And there’s got to be something there whether or not I find it. There is something there because I’m not going to discredit the devotion of these hundreds of thousands of people. Because if I do that, then I’m dooming myself to complete alienation from society. If I think they are all idiots, then I’ve screwed myself.
MJ: You were talking about having your music say something that you’ve wanted music to say or you’ve wanted it to sound like. And I’m interested in the theme of family in Lie Down in the Light, and I’m curious how you came to think about that, and how that theme works for you in the new album.
WO: I’ve been fortunate in that something that has been strong and stable in my existence has been my family, and even my extended family to cousins and aunts and uncles and my grandparents and such. And, so when I see things, when I see movies or…you don’t hear— I’m trying to run through my brain through music that is family related.
MJ: The Carter Family?
WO: They were a family that played, but I don’t know if they sang that much about it. And then there is the country music tradition of singing about the mother. There seems to be a current trend in modern country music to sing about, usually about a newborn child or about the daughter leaving the house at a certain age and moving on and becoming an adult.
So maybe more in books and movies, they seem to address more complex family relations, talking about brothers or cousins or grandparents more deeply. And those things have always resonated with me.
There’s a writer named Robert Johnson – he has no relation to the musician. His autobiography, I think it’s called Balancing Heaven and Earth. In it he describes, he had not much of a family structure growing up. And then as an adult he decided, “Because I wasn’t given a family by birth doesn’t mean I can’t have one.” And so he began to nominally create his family and say, “This person is my grandfather, this person is my uncle, this person is my brother,” with the idea being that these people, your family, are the unconditional ones. The ones that even when they do wrong, that’s when the rules go out the window. That’s when you embrace that person even if that person has done what you might not accept in a friend or in a colleague. That you continue to support and ideally, be supported by those people.
I’ve also been fortunate in my life to be part of a community of people that more or less, we consider eachother like cousins, if not brothers and sisters, to the point where I am Uncle Will to a lot of kids that I’m not physically related to. But it’s a natural feeling, you know. And it feels great. Because it does feel like when everything else falls apart that those relationships will be there and that they will stand tests of endurance that other relationships will not.
By extension though, I feel like – of course it can’t be as complex, it can’t be as deep rooted, ultimately it can’t be as strong in many ways – but that there is a musical community of players, writers, performers and especially listeners, because I’m sure that I am more of a listener, proportionately, timewise, in my life. I’m more of an audience member than anything else. And I hold a great kinship with people who are avid listeners, who pay attention, that like music that makes them feel good, that illuminates negative feelings of theirs, without forcing their hand to take negative action in support of those negative feelings. People who are open and avid and energetic about their relationship to music.
This March, Oldham released Beware, his eighth full-length album as Bonnie “Prince” Billy. It isn’t available at press time, but Drag City is billing it thusly: “Though Beware shares spit with its immediate predecessor released this past summer, Lie Down in the Light, it’s reach is longer and stronger, more grandiose.”
A 2007 biopic on Bob Dylan, directed by Todd Haynes, where six actors play Dylan in an attempt to show his many artistic transformations and/or personas. The most talked-about Dylan roles in the movie were performed by a young African-American (Marcus Carl Franken) and a woman (Cate Blanchett).
A Bonnie “Prince” Billy EP released in 2007 that includes cover songs of Bjork, Danzing, Phil Ochs and R. Kelly.
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