Bonnie “Prince” Billy “Wolfroy Goes to Town”
In 1994, somebody played me Palace Brothers’ “Days in the Wake.” I can’t remember who it was (it was college) but, whoever it was, they were absolutely much cooler than me. Probably from the Midwest. Probably studied engineering. Definitely loved Slint. Even then, as little as I knew, I understood that it was a test — that I was supposed to have a reaction to hearing Will Oldham’s voice for the first time. Possibly an emotional one. Certainly an intellectual one.
There were questions implicit in the presentation: Was I able to discern the sincerity from artifice? Was this the work of some outsider artist from the foothills of Appalachia or was this a new frontier in indie hipsterdom? Was the music an important revelation or just a satire that warbled its way into a good tune? And, perhaps, most pressingly, what was the fucking deal with this guy — what was he hiding?
Too proud to beg for answers, I just listened to the album some more. I was nineteen at the time and had no code for deciphering this kind of art. I was nominally aware of Daniel Johnston and Jad Fair, so I’d heard out of tune, beat up guitars under tragic howls before. But those Palace Brothers’ songs seemed too good, too complex, too deep to be coming from an amateur or someone from the “outside.” “I Send My Love to You” was kind of a perfect little song. And, the more I listened to “No More Workhorse Blues” — wherein the singer finally yelps in crescendo that he’s not a workhorse but, rather, a racing horse — the more I got the sense that this was an important something or other. Unfortunately, I still couldn’t figure out if he was something or other.
Months later, I was driving late at night in New York City, listening to WFMU, when song came on with a slinky bass and some sinister, electric guitar. There was the slightest bit of wah wah in it. And then a familiar voice came in. I couldn’t place it until it completely broke at the chorus, when the warble got loud and strong. It was the sound of somebody in a wheelchair standing up for the first time. It was the sound of George McFly closing his fist and punching Biff. It was that guy! It was Will Oldham. It was a new song from a forthcoming album called “Viva Last Blues.” I was breathless. How had he managed this trick? In the shape-shift from Palace Brothers to Palace Songs, from “Workhorse Blues” to “Cat’s Blues,” I began to think that maybe it wasn’t a trick. I began to think that it was honest to goodness magic.
During the 90s and 2000s the story and cult of Will Oldham grew. Through 2003s “Master and Everyone,” each album an increasingly bigger event, simultaneously building upon and tearing down the myth of the last one. 1999s “I See A Darkness” is considered by many to be peak Oldham. It is also the first album wherein he takes the name Bonnie “Prince” Billy, which he would largely stick with during the decades to followed. And though I’m partial to the sheer exuberance and disruption of “Viva Last Blues,” it’s hard to describe “Darkness” as anything less than a crowning achievement. The music sounded both traditional and post-everything. The title song is the stuff of epitaphs and was, appropriately, covered by Johnny Cash. On “All Around,” Oldham gave us the thesis for what would preoccupy much of his God-filled, God-less music to follow:
Every terrible thing
Is a relief
Even months on end
Buried in grief
Are easy light times
Which have to end
With the coming
Of your death friend
Death to everyone
Is gonna come
In those early years, I would see Will Oldham perform live any chance I could. In part, this was because I really liked his music. But it was also because he seemed so confounding to me that I felt like a live experience might yield more clues. Sometimes when I saw him, I was seeing something from the avant-garde. Other times, I was seeing an aging, good ole boy in a trucker hat, fronting the Rolling Thunder Revue. Half the time he seemed like a happy drunk. The other half of the time, he seemed like a serious drinker. Whether he was just mercurial like Bob Dylan or completely in character like Andy Kaufman, I had no idea. Nobody I knew had any idea. And Will Oldham wasn’t going to share. As the internet took hold of music and most artists were endlessly available for interviews or personal revelations, Will Oldham demurred. But, around 2004, it seemed that music started pouring out of him. Bonnie “Prince” Billy albums. Collaborations. Guest appearances. Oldham covering his own music. It seems that, for the better part of a decade, the well was bottomless. And yet, everything was a surprise. Albums were not announced far ahead of time. There was little or no press or promotion given. There was just the album and the tour.
Unless you saw Will Oldham perform live, it was rare that you got to hear him speak about, well, anything. But, almost as if to keep us off balance, he would show up in a movie. Or in a Kanye video. Or on an R. Kelly track. His predictable unpredictability approached Bill Murray status. For the small, but loyal, audience that really cared about what Will Oldham had to say, the messages were never clear. As ti whether Will Oldham worked hard to be opaque or whether his audience was more obsessed with transparency, I could not say.
As the years passed, Will Oldham settled into Bonnie “Prince” Billy. The side hustles were generally retired, but the troubadour stayed consistent. Every year, we would get a new record. We wouldn’t know when it would arrive or what it might sound like, much less what it meant. But it would come. And it would generally be excellent. And the tour would be successful. And then something different, but similar, would happen the next year. It became harder and harder to distinguish between the releases. The covers and titles were always both wild and wildly different from the previous album. The bands were rotating casts of friends and family. But, with each album, there was a progressive move away from traditional songs and towards a lyrical, almost Biblical, Folk music that was also aware of Country music. There was decidedly less Rock in the music. Oldham’s voice got quieter and more patient. The songs featured pretty, but increasingly haunting, with female vocals in the back or in duet. First, it was Cheyenne Mize. Then Ashley Webber. And then, around the time he was forty and she was twenty-three, it was Angel Olsen. Of all the Bonnie “Prince” Billy albums from the last decade, “Wolfroy Goes to Town” stands out not because of its subject or material, but because of the introduction of Angel Olsen’s voice to the music of Will Oldham.
“Wolfroy Goes to Town” was released in 2011 to modest fanfare. Though he was a precocious old soul by most standards, at this point, Oldham was fully middle-aged. He had less hair on top and a very proud, very unruly beard. Whatever you thought of him and his music, he looked the part. Rather than assembling a band and then recording while writing, Oldham wrote the songs and brought them to the players to play in the studio. There is certainly improvisation and surprise on the record, but you also hear a bunch of thoroughly structured, highly restrained set of songs on “Wolfroy.” Though the Folk and Country stylings are familiar, the music also sounds “traditional,” as though they were passed down for centuries. Obsessed with God and the Sea, the album is also as inscrutable and poetic as Oldham has ever been.
In middle age, and despite the rate of his output, Oldham got formally patient. His singing is more reserved and the guitar simpler and more repetitive. There’s a comfort in it. But there’s also a searching. One trick he begins to pull around this time is the very occasional “plug in” where an electric guitar, slide guitar, drums or piano comes to the front of a song out of nowhere in order to achieve great drama and effect. The other trick he employs, to even greater effect, is the chorus of voices that join him, often led by a female singer, as he looks to break through or punctuate a notion. In those moments — when the harmony kicks in — it’s as though we are shocked to learn that the lonely hermit has a choir behind him. Or maybe a congregation. Or a cult. Whatever it is, it is affecting. It is especially so when the primary accompanist is Angel Olsen, who can match the vibrato of Oldham’s warble with twice the range.
Very few of the songs on “Wolfroy Goes to Town” have a standard song structure or beat to them. Most are hushed, plaintive Folk meditations with occasional moments of grandeur. “No Match,” the opener, is a jaunty Country-ish song about our nothingness — a theme that Oldham visits frequently. It builds to a rickety singalong where Olsen joins him as they celebrate the acceptance of their insignificance. “Quail and Dumplings” almost grooves, in a Bonnie “Prince” Billy sort of way. The song, ostensibly about poor, broken believers who tire of waiting for god to deliver their feast, plugs in midway through. The subjects decide to simply take what they deserve — their quail and dumplings. The guitar roars a bit, the hands clap and Angel Olson takes over. Her voice is full of exhaustion and desire and anger in her voice. It’s electrifying.
In between those two songs, which are built with tempo and reward the patience, there is a lot of waiting for things to happen. Most of the songs are pretty, with just spare finger picking and the slightest bass and pedal organ. The words are glorious, if enigmatic, but the pace slows to a sloth-like crawl. Oldham sings about the absence of god, the fallacy of religion and the complete nothingness of it all. On “Time to be Clear,” for instance, which is either a succinct, fact-based repudiation of religion or a cheeky jab at Scientology, Oldham sings:
Stop all the moaning and bemoaning of fate
God isn't listening or else it's too late
This is your song and your song it is great
We're singing "it's time to be clear"
Time to be clear and leave our old worlds and build new stories here
Lover oh lover please buy me a beer
And bring all your enemies here
It’s barely a song. Just some guitar strings picked at and some bass plucked. But no singer has ever written about the ancient and ethereal, in concert with the mundane and carnal, like Will Oldham. Additionally, midway through, Olsen takes over for about a fifteen second lullaby that repays what verges on boredom. In that song, we are given the meat of “Wolfroy.” It is music that contains a centuries old wisdom. It sounds like the wisdom of god without religion. Wisdom of the sea. And with this wisdom, the singer asks for patience and acceptance. He asks us to find joy and love in nothing. On “We Are Unhappy,” he sings:
Nothing is better
Nothing is best
We are unhappy
We are unblessed
We are unfound
We are unseen
Nothing is coming
Nothing is clean
Earth it is shaking, people fled
And lord she is taking the eyes from the dead
Demonised body, exorcised mind
Pieces of kindness exchanged in kind
It’s been nearly thirty years since I first heard Will Oldham sing. Rarely do I rush to listen to his new albums anymore. And when I read his slightly more frequent interviews, I am now struck by how “smart but normal” he sounds. After having pored over the text and meta-text of Palace Bonnie Oldham for so long, I eventually grew comfortable with the idea that he was both always everything I considered and always none of it. And that his trick wasn’t a trick. And it wasn’t magic. It was just the surprises in his music. The instruments. And the words. And, most of all, the voices.