Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You (Album Review)

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While Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You is very recognisably a Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album, it is also a calculated, if slight, departure. These songs have a life-affirming quality to them, a willingness to exist in the present, and as a result, this is one of Oldham’s most rewarding albums.

I read an article about Taylor Swift today. The author was attempting to explain Swift’s longevity and consistent popularity in an otherwise fickle music business. It seems remarkable, almost miraculous, that an artist can stay at the very top for more than a decade and a half. The article made me think of a number of independent artists who have been releasing high-quality music for a much longer period. It made me think, specifically, of Will Oldham (Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy), whose first album (under the Palace Brothers name) came out thirty years ago, when Swift was only three years old.

The comparison between Swift and Oldham doesn’t tell you much, except perhaps that the world of indie music is more forgiving, more tolerant of change and more concerned with substance over style than commercial pop. But you knew all that anyway. It also tells us that maybe we should value our indie darlings, that we should never take them for granted: for every Oldham or Bill Callahan, there is a David Berman, gone far too early, or a Joanna Newsom, whose utterly captivating albums seem to come around like comets, once in a generation.

So it’s great to get a new Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album. Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You is Oldham’s first solo record since 2019’s excellent I Made A Place, which is quite a gap for someone as prolific as he is. But after all these years, the general outline of any Will Oldham record is familiar, even predictable. It’s a good thing, then, that he places importance in specifics over generalities: the weird little nuances that make him stand out, and that make every Bonnie song distinct from one another, are here in abundance. Opener Like It Or Not is a strung-out country-folk slow-shuffle that seems to pilfer from various facets of Oldham’s career to date: the lyrics, as ever, walk a line between the gnomic and the declamatory. Here they are tempered by something less nihilistic and more open than some of his previous work. Lines like ‘everyone smiles when they see something rendered with justice‘ and ‘everyone dies in the end so there’s nothing to hide‘ are timeworn without being defeatist, and Dane Waters’ spooky-folk backing vocals elevate the chorus to something closer to transcendence than you would normally expect from Oldham.

There are some surprises here too: the bubbling organ (courtesy of Kendall Carter) that underpins Behold Be Held is a delight, as is the sudden interjection of Drew Miller’s sax. Bananas is, quite frankly, bananas, but not perhaps in the way you’d think, a strange and tender love song that again makes good use of Waters’ ethereal singing. Blood Of The Wine is by turns stately and urgent: there is a weird energy at play, a tension between the mandolin and the violin that gives a framework to Oldham’s quasi-religio-sexual musings. But it’s not all wall-to-wall weirdness. Previous Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy albums have had their share of sweet, simple melodies, and this one doesn’t disappoint. Queens Of Sorrow is practically a Simon and Garfunkel song. The minimal acoustic strum of Kentucky Is Water is one of the most affecting things Oldham has written to date; Rise And Rule (She Was Born In Honolulu) perfects the gently meandering freak folk he helped invent all those years ago, while Willow, Pine and Oak has a nursery-rhyme approachability that masks a more complex meaning.

The imagery of trees plays an important part on the album – the reflective Willow, Pine and Oak is followed up by the comparatively confrontational (and more experimental) Trees Of Hell, which rails against the pain inflicted on the natural world by human action and revels in the gory details of an imagined judgement day in which plants take a very physical kind of revenge. Oldham has always been adept at locating metaphysical themes in the natural world, and he works this particular magic all over Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You. Perhaps best of all is the woozy country shimmer of closer Good Morning, Popocatépetl with its dawn-haze of organ. Whereas this is very recognisably a Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album, it is also a calculated, if slight, departure. These songs have a life-affirming quality to them, a willingness to exist in the present, and as a result, this is one of Oldham’s most rewarding albums.

“Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You,” available on LP/CS/CD/Digital from Domino Records/Drag City on August 11, 2023.