1. Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s new cd, Beware, was released on Tuesday and is perhaps the most anticipated recording of Will Oldham’s career. For those of you new to his music, I’ll give you the history in short. Oldham was a child actor and continues to occasionally appear in films. He took the photograph for the cover of Slint’s Spiderland album. He started recording under various Palace monikers – Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Palace Songs and, simply, Palace. He records under his own name, as well as under the name Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Famously reluctant to give interviews, Oldham was unexpectedly candid in a recent New Yorker profile. Oldham loves to visit hot springs and reportedly organizes his tours around them. This seems incidental, but if you were to attempt to explain his music to someone who hasn’t heard it before, the feeling of lying in a hot spring might be a good place to start. The music is circular and often spare. His voice is warbly and high, although when you hear him sing with other musicians, its clarity and resonance become apparent. Oldham is known for making his recordings with some of the band members unrehearsed. Sometimes, the musicians don’t hear the songs for the first time until they are actually being recorded.2. I read something recently that suggested BPB isn’t driving music. When I used to drive a truck for a living, I often found myself hitting fast forward during his songs, even though I very much like them. There have a languid quality that makes the ride feel long and even claustrophobic. This is my first major point about Beware. You can drive to it. There is a steady, churning, insistent quality to the rhythms. BPB often counterpoises anachronism with the utterly contemporary. An example from the back catalogue: a loose, haunting piano waltz played against a drum machine is called, “You Have Cum in Your Hair and Your Dick is Hanging Out.” These counterbalancing tensions are found in other ways, and Beware is full of them: some of the musicians, particularly the backup singers, sound rehearsed and offer perfect, rich harmonies, while others play as though they are improvising. The lyrics are bald and almost uncomfortably honest, but, as with Oldham’s hero Merle Haggard, the precisely autobiographical blends into intimations of the Everyman and the Everyromance. The traveling rhythm I note above at times evokes trains or even wagons, but, on the songs where Oldham seems most inspired by Gram Parsons and Gordon Lightfoot, we are in the world of cars and open highways.
3. In fact, for his apparent archness, lyrically, Oldham seldom strays from basic themes of popular music: mostly sex, but God as well.
4. Few lyricists can be so blunt, and appear so cryptic. Much of this comes from the listener’s inability to determine what is lyrical (in the older sense, with an assumption of insight and autobiography), what is ironic, and what is ballad (again, in the older sense, involving a story). And, outside of the films of Eric Rohmer or the writings of Proust, you won’t likely find depictions of love so decentering. A rowdy song starts off promising for our young lover: “sometimes you like the smell of me or how my stomach jiggles/even if that smell is liquor . . . but you don’t love me.” Our anticipations are thwarted and we are disappointed as well. This man sounded so optimistic! But again, the unexpected: “that’s all right/because you cling to me/all through the night.”
5. Here is Oldham at his most Haggardesque: “I don’t belong to anyone/There’s no one who’ll take care of me/It’s kind of easy to have some fun/When you don’t belong to anyone.”
6. If this is the voice of Oldham or of his inventions, we’re not sure, but through the conflicted love, the lyrics convey a search for purpose: “if I follow the song I hear/will another come near,” “I’ll likely never know/The answer why/You are hello/I am goodbye.” The ambiguities between a personal search for the good life, the search for romance, and the search for transcendent meaning are often answered with a shrug and a turn to work itself, be it creative or otherwise. “Yeah work baby and all good things will gather/love to your buckets, to honor your father/and arms will hold you!”
7. I don’t want to waste time speculating on the title, but I will say this. A close listen to the music and a reading of the lyrics suggest what we might beware of: loneliness, pointlessness, and darkness of various sorts. I would have to imagine that the title adds tension to two words that recur throughout the songs: work and light. Given how prolific Oldham is, it isn't surpising to see work invoked as a stay against confusion. Yet it is clear that this work serves a higher purpose.
8. I also don’t want to waste time speculating on whether or not this will be the recording that pushes Oldham out of the constraints of a cult following into the mainstream. Listeners have known long enough that he belongs among the serious and challenging great American songwriters: Foster, Dylan, Haggard, and Hank Williams. I will say it’s a beautiful album that reveals more with each listen. I suspect it will seem a high watermark in the BPB canon.
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