A Social Beast

Will Oldham, who records primarily as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, is a social character, defined by friendships both real and imagined, not only with the musicians surrounding him, but historical figures and strangers halfway across the world. He’s not, as is oft hypothesized, a lone Appalachian freak sitting in a cabin bleeding his heart out.

Oldham’s personal journey is well chronicled, but worth relaying. After rejecting a future in acting, Oldham, 38, spent a mysterious lost year drifting through Europe and taking sailing lessons. It’s rumored that he told close friends about plans to adopt the life of a pirate. Fortunately, encouragement from his brothers led Oldham to focus on songwriting, and he began recording songs. The albums from these early sessions yielded a fleeting and fractured, but always consistent, narrative. The diverse aesthetic qualities and the wide range of personnel Oldham employed as his catalog grew, led him to adopt an array of monikers for his projects—he eventually settled on Bonnie “Prince” Billy in 1999.

The usefulness of biography ends there. Bonnie “Prince” Billy allowed Oldham to separate his own persona and psyche from the proceedings, which led to more inclusive songs that stand alone.The difficult lyricism of records such as Arise Therefore (1996) took a backseat to a more communal and mystical conception of language. Oldham continues to explore this path.

“You Will Miss Me When I Burn” from the 1994 release, Days In The Wake, could freeze your body under the sheets with its opening salvo: “When you have no one/ No one can hurt you.”While the unflinching directness of this line still haunts Oldham’s work, the isolation has decreased. “I See A Darkness” from the eponymous 1999 record—and notably covered by Johnny Cash on American III— finds the narrator opening up to the world: “Well you know I have a love/ A love for everyone I know.” Oldham became someone who was there for his listeners, beyond his mysterious Kentucky warble.

“That’s what the songs are ideally about,” says Oldham, sitting next to a stack of vintage High Times magazines and sipping an IPA from a wine glass in his suite at the Algonquin Hotel. “That’s the story right there… My records, they don’t have a million fans in the U.S., and they never will. Do they have a million worldwide?” He shrugs. “I feel like I have a friend in Laos.The songs are my way of trying to find that friend.”

Oldham’s imaginary friend concept seems especially sincere on his new album, Beware (out March 17), an epic effort filled and lushly arranged with a communal spirit.The “you” Oldham has consistently used to address his friends, listeners and lady has now opened up to become the universal “everyone.”

Oldham confirms this, “I feel the song is completed when the writing is done and I present it to a friend, partner or group of musicians. Then it’s completed when we record together and finish mixing.Then it’s completed each and every time someone listens.”

Beware recognizes this and, in that respect, feels like a conclusion. Not to suggest Oldham is done writing, but that his outlook now encompasses everyone and everything. The duets are close to gone. Now we have choirs, and big ones at that.

Oldham also presents personal trouble as cause for public celebration. When the chorus of: “The more I feel myself/ The more alone I am” kicks in, Oldham is not really alone at all. He is joined by magic voices yelling with him in joyous camaraderie.

Regarding process, Oldham treats the production of his albums with the mind-set of a filmmaker. “I came up as an actor observing how theatrical, film and TV productions were mounted, so when it came time for making records, that was the model I had to draw from.” He pulls on one of the two pigtails in his beard. “My albums sort of do function as films or yearbooks. I try to document the pure moments that occur over a month between a very particular group.”

Oldham is also a rich aesthetic historian. He openly cites disparate influences that range from pop culture icons like R. Kelly and Merle Haggard to obscure modernists including Knut Hamsun and Charles Willeford. Hamsun’s work, in particular, bears striking resemblance to Oldham’s style and biography. Hunger, Hamsun’s best-known novel, features a nameless wanderer who constantly tries on new identities before he finally runs out of luck and submits to the high seas.The language exudes purity—it’s austere, direct, brutal, even biblical—but is firmly planted in unconventional modernity. As in Oldham’s songs, the narrator’s suffering is revealed in playful prose that ultimately embraces life over death.

Oldham reflects, “People such as Knut Hamsun are true friends of mine. I figure that I have friends I could never know because they lived before me. Hamsun and others are important people who have given me a whole lot: insight, perspective, entertainment and all that.”

All those characteristics are ever-present in Oldham’s catalogue. His narrators are fools, entertainers, God-fearers, God-teasers, blackness, light, past, present, beasts and all. A multiplicity of song striving for humble, truthful language. In the era of corporate music mergers, trendy reverb wash and skronk for the skronk of it, Oldham’s card remains the honest presentation of great songs.

It’s not for money or credentials. It’s just “because.” So if you’d really want to know Oldham as a friend, put on his records.