MELODY NIXON finds joy in Will Oldham’s blackness; spirit, genius, and so many other things. She relays her devotion to the poet, actor, musician and neo-hillbilly folk singer – currently known as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – in relation to his latest album, The Letting Go.


I’M NOT ONE for fan culture myself. Why waste time revering someone you will never get to know, if you can find awe-inspiring people right here in everyday life?

But when I met Will Oldham in 2006, all pretence of normal person meets another normal person went flying out the window of Golden Bay’s Mussel Inn. To be sure, Oldham seemed like a pretty normal dude, if also a genius. I quickly realised however, that I was not normal; I was obsessed, a die hard fan, a fan who had walked four days to see his concert. Clichéd, giddy and nauseating; and that was just me during the warm up act.

Poet, actor, musician and neo-hillbilly folk singer, Will Oldham aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy unwittingly has the effect of creating total devotion amongst his followers. Last year he was in New Zealand on his latest tour of the pubs, bathhouses and back bars of the North and South. He played small shows but they were often sold out and more importantly, were not full of passive listeners. These were people who got him, and were there to reflect and to rejoice.

— This man is spiritual, said a 50-year-old natural scientist I met at the Mussel Inn, and assumed was on drugs. The concert there was bubbling over with locals in colourful vests, vibrating on the end of their manuka beers. Ecstatic Spanish backpackers crowded around, asking for “some foto”. I agreed with the natural scientist; Will Oldham accesses something pure and ethereal in his work. But his is an unusual kind of spiritualism.

After the concert, he told me earnestly that he had chosen to be reincarnated as hyena. I was taken aback; I had asked him if he liked Golden Bay.
— A hyena, he insisted. Protesting, I said I didn’t think he could choose to be reincarnated as anything.
— Why not? he asked. Doesn’t free will continue after we die?

This – combined with a searing minor-key voice – is the hallmark of the Oldham indie-folk style. Both musically and lyrically, unanswerable questions pepper his works like dark crochets. His words have a Beckettian way of trapping the mind in paradox; but whereas Beckett keeps the mind tolling back and forth between problems, Oldham – or perhaps his music – allows for a way out.

— I’ve got to make sure I’m bad enough to be turned into a hyena, Oldham elaborated that night. But not too bad to revert back to an amoeba. That would be tedious; can you imagine? An amoeba would be a lot of wasted work.

The Building Up

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy began sharing his talent with others when he was 15. His art form music, his vehicle the guitar, he transformed his soul into chord and voice and found a secret frequency of his own: a wavelength that communes with the spirit. You intuit the sound of the music before your eardrums translate it into a brain recognisable form. You get him. He can do nothing, I imagine, but share that frequency with us.

He was on his 7th album by the time his music came to me. Ease on Down the Road I later found was the name of that album: fragmented and nameless on the mixed tape I had been given by some traveler. I had a sense of his communication, and his lyricism at once, but it was months before it really burrowed beneath my skin. Of the folk tradition, his songs must be learned, not heard. You can not be a passive listener.

He has produced 5 albums since Ease on Down the Road, under myriad names. Palace music, Black rich tunes, Bonnie/Bonny Prince Billy, Will Oldham; he changes his name whenever he becomes ‘popular’, seeking in an ascetic way to remain true to his art.
      I take my lessons from what’s poor-
      That is what God’s put me for.
      Wealth is death, of that I’m sure,
      Fare-thee-well.

Over the course of these most recent albums he has moved organically away from the searching whimsy of his twenties and grown strongly instead into the thundering questions of death and fear. In one song he claims to have conquered his fear of death, and it is a theme for many of his pieces. It is life, he then says, he has not conquered his fear off.

‘I see a darkness’, his most well-known song, has been covered by Johnny Cash, a tribute that must have affirmed his every self-belief as he lists Cash, along with Dylan, as his main inspirers.

Yet he too has served as an inspirer for many. Folk and indie rock artists from Iron & Wine to Calexico pay him homage on the aptly named tribute album I am a Cold Rock, I am Dull Grass. On Bjork’s 2001 album Vespertine she sings of the ‘Harm of Will’.

      If there’s a troubador washing : it is he
      If there’s a man about town : it is he
      It there’s one to be sought : it is he
      If there are nine she’s : they are bought for me

This tribute song is co-written with another music-art-author extraordinaire Harmony Korine (director of the well known Dogme film Julian Donkey-Boy, in which Oldham played a minor role), who sung with Oldham on ‘Ease on Down the road’. These darkly odd lyrics search to create the same intrepid folk experimentation that marks Oldham’s style as unique, and the collaboration with Korine shows Oldham’s potential for crossover between artistic genre.

In fact Oldham has been involved acting and film since the age of 17, becoming reasonably successful in Hollywood before quitting, disillusioned, in late 80s. The late 90s saw his return to cinema, with roles in indie films such as Junebug (2005) and the recently released Old Joy.

The Letting Go

Oldham’s troubadour reputation is all but firmly established with the release of his latest folk album The Letting Go. This singer of lyric verse and courtly love seems to have once again abandoned past musical concerns. No longer dark and ethereal, The Letting Go is rolling, full of love, and challengingly domestic.

The defining trait of the Oldham style are all present. Folk tales bring tradition and continuity. “There was someone a long time ago...” begins ‘God’s Small Song’. The care and conflict of the extraordinary ‘Lay and Love,’ makes direct contact with the heart. That track is full of characteristically powerful and simple rejoicing, both in the unusual ‘Appalachian’ beats and the earnest words:
      From what I’ve seen you are magnificent
      you fight evil with all you do
      your every act is spectacular
      it makes me lay here and love you.

True to tradition, The Letting Go is also layered with paradoxical lyrics. “I slept sweetly unpretending/ that the night was always ending.” (‘Cursed Sleep’) Such lyrics blissfully free up the listener to simply feel the emotion and intent of the art. “I’ve got a feeling from what I do/that you might lay there and love me too.” (‘Big Friday’) Though this line does not bear deconstruction, it is intuitively just right.

Most beautifully, The Letting Go contains a sure sign of Oldham’s genius – the confidently experimental use of syntax that lies at the heart of his poetry. “The backs of your knees conceal me” says Will “and your eyeballs they unreal me.”

Dawn McCarthy is a prominent feature of the album, singing duet and harmony in all songs except the final. Her voice is sweet and sometimes piercing, but does not match the minor-key rawness of Will’s. Past collaborators such as Matt Sweeney successfully added to the impact of the music as a whole; McCarthy at times seems to drain momentum and energy. A more exceptional and unusual musician is needed to stretch Oldham to new limits and create more of the ‘spontaneous moments of greatness’ for which he is infamous.

McCarthy’s presence in the album has perhaps provoked the marked increase in love and tenderness. For the first time, it seems Oldham is singing to just one woman: “You o sugar, won’t you be my only.” For the first time, Oldham sounds almost, unusually, content. Familiar strands of conflict soon creep in, but even these are of a domestic nature. “From what I know you’re terrified/you have mistrust running through you.” (‘Lay and Love’)

A continued element of contentedness in his work might in some ways lessen Oldham’s impact. What use is a poet, if (s)he isn’t questioning? But judging by his history this is one artist to whom anything can happen. Staying with one emotion seems about as likely as sticking to one name.

And as he says, blackness is his beauty. Darkness that is; the black that engulfs and horrifies. The black that resides at some point of every person’s spectrum, more or less fogged over. He is the only person to have ever convinced me of the joy of it. If this country, folk, post-punk, neo-hillbilly, ill definable artist continues to see change as immutable as he says it is, then not only his afterlife status as a hyena, but his presentlife status as a genius musician, is fluidly guaranteed.

See also:
» Darkness, then Light: Old Joy