Will Oldham/Palace/Bonnie Prince Billie: S&D

Further comments... there's a six minute long, full-band version of "No More Workhorse Blues" on this bootleg from Austria I found. Crazy. Parts of it sound spanish, then when the song climax the drums really start to come in. Unrecognizable initially!

There's also a wonderfully twisted piece written by will in today's guardian.

(p.s. THANKS NA!!!!!!)

A question, though: how can I find out who played on/produced the songs, without tracking down the original singles? The big Oldham websites don't seem to have that info. I'd like to know which song(s) were produced by Kramer, Adam & Eve, etc...

there's always been a protean quality to his music, which often goes overlooked largely because of the superhuman insularity of his misterioso hillbilly shtick. people tend to link him with these old balladeer types, which a certain prominent vein of his music does encourage. but i hear--sublimated and reconstituted beautifully in the last 3 records--a whole bunch of less-austere influences (sorry mark) there, like a thousand singer-songwriters and alterindie bands.

I don't know why I never really responded to the other Palace albums (though I like some of the songs on "Days in the Wake"). These early singles are just another breed - not just the songs themselves, but the production, the playing, the atmosphere...

"just to see my holly home" is a very funny song. it's about, i guess, the dark side of the whole "nuclear family" thing--the family has a remarkable closeness, but it comes from denigrating and attacking all others and ultimately locking them and the world out forever. oldham cheerfully places mysogynystic musings next to a kind of idealization of his partner/family. anyway this is a boring exegesis but what makes it work is how oldham finds a peculiar balance b/t silliness and earnestness. the balance wouldn't hold if the song had such an insinuating sound.

xpost

i'm not kidding.

What should I buy next?

a) Ease On Down The Road
b) The Lost Blues comp
c) Arise, Therefore
d) Not these ones you nut
d) Bugger it, get them all

BTW, I no longer have the indie guilt referred to up thread. I drowned it in the bath tub last week, most satisfying.

PLUS the "one with the birds"/"take however long you want" single.

piers are you looking for a oldham cd to buy next? i'd recommend "i see a darkness" and then probably one of the two "lost blues" comps and then "days in the wake". "master and everyone" is better than "ease down the road," i think, though both are good. i actually find latterday oldham more interesting than earlier oldham even if the records haven't been perfect.

Mine just finally got delivered last night! Hoping to give my first spin later today.

A lot of Drag City's resources are being held for the next Joanna Newsom record and Will likes to move fast.

Had that same thought.

Also did the Bandcamp listening party last week for the album--love it so far. Obliterates any Gen X idea of "you don't want to get caught sounding polished" (though BPB did that a long time ago once before with Nashville cats).

i didnt mean to imply anything untoward, he just sounds so intense & personal in that clip, but also yeah, idgaf. the new record is really good, i've listened to it a bunch, its been kind of just what i need to get through the last week or so of political terror

boise idaho is so good

I was the biggest Will Oldham fan in my 20s (like I travelled to see him 3 nights in a row in Vancouver, etc.) and I still am a fan (though you can guess I admittedly haven't kept up with him as much in recent years) but I'm not as fond of this new one as much as you guys are

idk maybe I prefer him a bit more brooding?

There are great songs on this one, in their way, but at the risk of "the older stuff was better!" banality, there has been something comfortable, domestic, unthreatening in his music, at least in the last 10 years or so. Nothing wrong with that, perhaps, and I know his personal circumstances have changed. But I always thought the point of the various monikers, 'Bonnie Prince Billy' included, was to ward off too close a connection between the songs and the life.

Maybe I just want a bit more abstraction, some archaic diction, a bit more left to the imagination?

I love the new album but he’s a prick. This is from the Stereogum interview. It’s annoying.

How did you first encounter her and her music?

OLDHAM: It was 2002 maybe. We did a tour of the West Coast that was spurred on by a band called Rainywood, which morphed into Brightblack Morning Light. And we did three annual tours together. The first one was the West Coast. And in putting my band together, I think I was talking to Kyle Field of Little Wings and I think we figured out we were gonna rehearse in Portland, Oregon, and I asked if he knew of a keyboard player. And he referred me to his friend Rob Kieswetter, who records under the name Bobby Birdman. And he’s from Nevada City, Grass Valley area.

And so we finished the tour. Last show was in Solana Beach, California, close to San Diego. And all the musicians dispersed except for me, Colin Gagon, and Rob Kieswetter, and we had to return all the gear to Isaac Brock from Modest Mouse. We borrowed a bunch of gear from him. And on the way, Rob was like, “Why don’t we stop in Nevada City and play a show? There’s a movie theater there. I can just set something up.” So we went, and I remember seeing this young woman walking around, and she definitely had an interesting air about her, but I didn’t meet her.

In the van the next day, Rob said, “Oh, my friend Joanna gave me her CD-R, and she wanted you to hear it. I think it’s pretty good if you want to listen to it.” And yeah, I thought it was incredibly novel and compelling and interesting. And for the next tour with Rainywood — I can’t remember if they were Brightblack yet or not; we basically just moved one set of states over for the next summer — I asked her if she would open four or five shows. So we began just south of Solana Beach in San Diego the next year and then went into Arizona, New Mexico, Utah. And she played a handful of those shows, as did Dawn McCarthy.

I would often talk to Drag City about artists that I thought they might be interested in releasing, some of which they would not, and so that’s when I created a, you know, a sub-label Palace Records imprint to put things out like Alasdair Roberts’ Appendix Out project or Dave Pajo’s M. It was first called M before it was Papa M or Aerial M. But Drag City, for some reason, they liked the Joanna Newsom. And now we’re in the quandary we’re in today with her.

What’s the quandary?

OLDHAM: I’m kind of joking, but I’ve also just always been like — well, I don’t know. Is she making music? I don’t know.

Oh, that quandary.

OLDHAM: Yeah, I mean, part of it is I appreciate artists who have a respectful relationship with their audience, and I’m not sure that’s evident there. But her husband makes a lot of money, so she doesn’t have to worry about it. Maybe if my wife made a lot of money, I would disappear and have children.

jesus!
that's rude

Yeah, that's gross. Is he hinting that he needs more credit for bringing her to Drag City's attention? Jealousy? Regardless, not a good look.

A few off-the-cuff remarks about how she married rich seem tame considering that Bluebeard song but w/e

I always had very complicated feelings about the Bluebeard song, not because I swear any allegiance to dudes, but because there was something awfully traditional about it - I think you can write about men who leave destruction in their wake, men who take advantage of their position as men to be emotionally careless at best and deceitful and exploitative at worst, without asking, "Who is going to bear your beautiful children? Who will take care of you when you're old and dying?" It sort of tries to paint patriarchal domesticity, the family and a woman's place in it, as feminist. I don't particularly like that, nor tbh the orientalist imagery.

I still do like the song a lot because there's something that rings true about it; I'm just not sure I trust Joanna to articulate it properly, or to have the imagination needed to envision something beyond it. I say this as someone who loves MEM and Ys a lot, and that they are better than anything Will has ever done.

That being said, I thought the song was directed more at Callahan than Oldham, despite the "Master and Everyone" reference. I have absolutely no confidence that either were not dickheads/stereotypical men in their day (or tbh even now).

Re: Will's quote about Joanna, I can't defend any of that if I take his words at face value. But after reading the entire interview, if I try to be generous and essentially put words in his mouth, I can see how someone whose life is so embedded in music-making - whose sense of community cannot be divorced from the practice of playing music with others - would be disappointed or even bitter to see a peer remove herself and marry into celebrity and money.

I'm sure she sees it very differently. I have no doubt that as a woman she was pushed away from that sense of belonging as much as she removed herself from it. But I'm also not too enthusiastic about the life she chose for herself. I'm a total nobody - and I'd never have this choice in the first place - but you wouldn't catch me dead attempting to enter that world either. I've loved her music a lot in the past, but I'm not sure I'm particularly interested in hearing more of her from the place she inhabits now.

I think I'm misunderstanding what the issue with her and Drag City is and how it relates to Will.

The issue is the limited time, money, and resources a smallish label like Drag City has for the pressing and promotion of a record. Joanna Newsome is the biggest seller of any Drag City release. She’s been currently recording new music, but doesn’t have a deadline or anything. But when that record is finished it will take up a lot of Drag Citys workload and they have to set all that aside for a record without a set release date. Instead of waiting for all that to get figured out Will just released his finished, and kinda most commercial in years record on a different label. And he seems mildly salty about it.

Guys

Just to be clear, Will’s move away from DC has nothing to do with either DC proper or Joanna Newsom, it was an other thing that is so boring that all this speculation seems idk ~~Ozymandian~~ in comparison

Also thanks rairun for that generous post

#dragcitydrama

Brother JT thinks Black Bananas are too macho

Drag City is releasing the soundtrack to Amanda Milius’ Trump documentary. Alternatively, Drag City isn’t releasing the soundtrack to Amanda Milius’ Trump documentary

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Back to The Purple Bird though, this really is excellent! I can see why some might not like this, but it's hitting me really well today.

“keeping secrets will destroy you” might be one of his best genuinely

Both Purple Bird and Keeping Secrets have hit my ears as returns to form, as different as they are. I'm a big John Prine fan and Purple Bird seems to bear his influence heavily, in a way that threatens to contaminate what makes Oldham special, but he manages to pull it off. The cleverness of Oldham's lyrics has always been a trademark but he has typically deployed it more for elegance than whimsy (not that Prine can't do both too, but his legacy here - and often - lies more on the whimsical side). Keeping Secrets is more what I think of as classic BPB, delicate sweetness with an undercurrent of darkness and tension that is usually there if it catches the light right. All that said, with a guy like Oldham, he works so much that I can never tell whether my digging new stuff has more to do with me, cycling back around to him and taking an interest in his latest, than it does with the quality of a particular new project. Either way, I'm enjoying listening to him again these days!