Bonnie “Prince” Billy – the stage name of Louisville musician Will Oldham – will release his new studio album We Are Together Again this Friday, March 6th, via Drag City, and today shares its final pre-release single: “Life is Scary Horses.”
The track is described by Oldham as a “spiritual cover” of the Sally Timms and Jon Langford composition “Horses” – Timms herself sings on the recording and appears in the accompanying video, directed by filmmaker Braden King. King previously helmed the video for Oldham’s 2004 cover of “Horses” from Greatest Palace Music, and the two have been in each other’s orbits for decades. The connection runs deep: the track also features strings arranged by Oldham’s cousin Ryder McNair and whistling by Thomas Deakin.
Oldham is careful to frame the piece on its own terms. “A primary reason to cover a song comes from the unanswered questions the song poses in our individual or collective psyches,” he explains, “and I have mulled ‘Horses’-generated questions over and over and over again in all sorts of circumstances until finally I thought I could bring those questions to life in a new composition, a new recording, of what can technically and essentially be called a new song.”
King’s account of the video – a meditation on landscapes, symbols, and vanishing certainties – carries a particular weight in the current moment. “This piece carries long memory,” he says. “Somehow, making this felt less like creating something new than uncovering something that had been waiting a long time to surface… the piece itself began to feel like a relic: an elegy left behind for a future that might not remember us.”
We Are Together Again was recorded at End of an Ear Studios in Louisville, Kentucky, and Oldham speaks warmly of the community that shaped it. “The people that built this beast with me, musically, are the finest to live among,” he says.
We Are Together Again is available to pre-order on limited transparent vinyl (+ exclusive art print via DomMart), standard vinyl, CD (+ poster) and digitally. Pre-order: DomMart | Digital