Will Oldham’s name has, for a while now, been a byword for a certain type of artistry that seems to be getting less and less common, a way of creating that involves complete autonomy and yet leaves generous room for collaboration. Any Oldham release – regardless of the name he is using at any given time – is strikingly, incontrovertibly his, conceived and recorded apparently without any attempt to pander to prevailing trends or appease the whims of the music industry. It has obviously helped that he has spent much of his career circling around the Domino Records/Drag City axis, where complete creative control is a given, but even so, there are very few musicians out there doing exactly what they want to do in quite such a determined and consistent way as Oldham.
It’s an approach that continues to serve him well. Oldham is now more than thirty years into his recording career, and has recorded somewhere in the region of twenty solo albums (and more than a handful of collaborations), mostly under the Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy moniker. His new release is, to put it in the simplest terms, a country and western album. It will go down as a solo project, but in reality, the presence of producer Dave ‘Ferg’ Ferguson is palpable all over The Purple Bird. The creative partnership has a similar feel to that between Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier on Histoire de Melody Nelson, or perhaps Bob Dylan’s collaboration with Jacques Levy on Desire (like Levy, Ferguson has songwriting credits on many of these tracks).
Sticking with the Dylan comparisons for a moment longer, The Purple Bird’s opening track, Turned to Dust (Rolling On), sounds like an amalgamation of two very distinct Dylan periods: the loving country send-up of Nashville Skyline and the religious (and slightly preachy) tone of his post-conversion albums. But in Oldham’s case, there is a sense of hard-won sincerity (and a genuine love of country music) that urges you to listen without cynicism.
Throughout the album, Oldham adopts Nashville tropes with such whole-hearted gusto that it’s impossible not to be drawn in. Tonight With the Dogs I’m Sleeping is the ultimate in hard-luck stories, well beyond pastiche, funny and clever enough to occupy the same sort of space as Oldham’s old label-mate David Berman, and then revelling in a surprising brassy breakdown. Brit Taylor, here and elsewhere on the album, plays the Emmylou Harris role with aplomb. One of These Days (I’m Gonna Spend the Whole Night With You) is the other side of the coin: the most tender and soulful of love songs.
Oldham’s band features some of Nashville’s finest talent, and he puts them to good use. The Water’s Fine skips along on a shuffling mandolin and guitar combo, while the fiddle and electric guitar solos recall the more energetic bits of Gram Parsons’ albums. Country singer John Anderson gets a lead vocal slot on the second half of the elegiac Downstream, which features a yearning tin whistle and a decidedly Celtic flavour. Our Home, co-written by mandolinist Tim O’Brien, serves as the album’s rousing closer, a communal hymn to the shared joys of domesticity.
There are more serious moments too, like the atmospheric, piano-led ballad London May, which rises out of darkness into a soaring chorus, and the surprisingly moving Boise, Idaho, which explores country music’s obsessions with exile and American topography. Sometimes It’s Hard To Breathe is a velvet-gloved gut-punch where hope and despair rub shoulders, backed by some delightfully downbeat hand-drums and the occasional organ skitter. Guns Are For Cowards is a parping, Zydeco-adjacent singalong with a darker message than its musical levity implies.
New Water – one of a handful of songs about water and its cleansing or rejuvenating properties – is almost unbearably tender but feather-light, almost seeming to float away when the fiddle kicks in. Is My Living In Vain? is probably the closest we get to the starker, darker side of Oldham that characterised his early career, but even here, the darkness is balanced by a final note of hope.
The Purple Bird is a country album, complete with all the genre signifiers you could ever hope for, but for all its apparent familiarity, it’s a country record that nobody else could have possibly made. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy is still doing things entirely his own way, and he sounds as good as ever. Long may it continue.
The Purple Bird (31st January) Domino/No Quarter