Will Oldham: Songs of Love and Horror

Will Oldham – Songs of Love and Horror

Domino Recording Co – 19 October 2018

Acting as a companion piece alongside his recently released collected lyrics, Will Oldham returns with Songs of Love and Horror, a retrospective album which draws from his past twenty-five years performing as Palace Music and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. Many fans might know Bonnie as the singer and Oldham as the actor, Will could almost be regarded as a ghostwriter when considering his back catalogue. However here his enigmatic aliases hand back control for an unadorned set of tenderly sung, troubled songs that tap the darkness as only Oldham can.

As he conceded in an interview with the Guardian last year, “I’ve never had a hit song, and I never will” which is perhaps why we are presented with a record bearing the title Songs of – bringing to mind Cohen’s first three releases – as opposed to a dime-a-dozen Greatest Hits collection. Just as Songs of Leonard Cohen opens with Suzanne (first brought to a wider audience’s attention by Judy Collins’ version) Bonnie’s official debut began with I See A Darkness, a cult classic that in many ways defined his new direction as an artist. It is fair to say Oldham has always been too consumed writing confounding, crushing music to lose any sleep over the hit parade.

Hardly a year after its release he found himself in the studio with The Man in Black ready to track I See A Darkness for Cash’s American III: Solitary Man. Like Thomas Pynchon or Tom Waits, Oldham has masterfully clung on to his outlier edge. That said, he is also known to kick it with Kanye West and Björk on occasion and his music has soundtracked True Detective. An unrelenting collaborator and show-stealer of the odd indie flick, the man and his music defy simple categorisation and convention.

So it seems only right that the consoling chord changes of I See A Darkness serve again as a listener’s potential introduction to Oldham on Songs of Love and Horror. In 2012 it was swung with country pomp on Now Here’s My Plan and later live on KEXP, it writhed beneath his painted nails as he delivered it with an unfaltering gaze and absurd sincerity. Performed a thousand times over, it has lived many lives. Here it breathes freely with the faint chirp of birdcall overhead. Oldham sounds more assured and not just vocally. In the past, he has wrestled with the subject, audibly weary from the weight of the confession, upon reaching the chorus lift he’d finally confide “…and then I see a darkness”.

Whereas now Oldham sensitively interprets it as “that I see a darkness” with an awareness that comes across as a lot more hopeful. We may lose the rawness but we are rewarded with a sort of bittersweet wisdom that gilds each new interpretation. The Way, a prize cut off Master & Everyone drifts in without the stirring cello swoon. Instead, Oldham’s subtle handling of delivery drives the graceful wax and wane of the lyrics soft plea. The Glory Goes no longer shuffles with a dark Country Townes and tabla feel, instead, the stark arrangement hones in on the endless open interpretations of Oldham’s imagery. “You remind me of something, a song that I am and you sing me back into myself. When I wake, when I’m sleeping, the song is a man and a woman and everything else” words seemingly draped in monastic ropes, the way they deflect simple deduction and raise countless further questions.

I was lucky enough to catch a rhinestone-studded BPB last year in the stunning confines of London’s Union Chapel. One moment that stands out in memory alongside a cover of Cohen’s Night Comes On is his tribute to June Tabor and Richard Thompson with his a capella rendition of Thompson’s Strange Affair. For Tabor’s BBC Four Session with Martin Simpson, she reflected on how Thompson had based the song on a Sufi poem that reads, “When you have given up. When you think you are alone and will be alone for the rest of your life, look again. God is waiting” It acts as a befitting homage chosen by Oldham as the album draws to a close, a moment of quiet reflection giving further context to his hushed selections.

New Partner (picked up by The Frames back in 2002) is a penultimate parting gift. A love song of real complexity again mellowed by time, our singer does not sound as though he is being eaten away by guilt when he picks apart the lines “when you think like a hermit, you forget what you know” instead it appears to be a lesson gravely learned. New Partner and much of his older repertoire was revisited on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music where it received sterling treatment from Andrew Bird and some of Country’s finest session players, with focus on it’s rollicking, soulful arrangements. Quite rightly, Songs of Love and Horror does not try to make up for what it lacks in regard to Palace Music’s eccentricities or BPB’s extreme turns, be those sombre or jubilant. Instead, it appears refined, as if held under immense pressure, centring on the shameless anxieties, solitary beauty and excavated ugliness of Oldham’s lyrics. It stands alone as more of a 21^st century songbook for a future wave of aspiring singer-songwriters, that rings with the words spoken by Oldham’s character Kurt in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy – “Sorrow is nothing but worn out joy”