They say “never meet your heroes” – the inference being that they could never live up to the Himalayan peaks of your projected affection. Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy, has been my favourite contemporary musician ever since I heard I See A Darkness as a gawky, virginal 17-year-old in ’99. I studied its lessons of sex, death, carnal humour and defiant vulnerability like they were my A-Levels. Four years later I was staring at his backside from the drum stool on stages around the world.
Will Oldham is the great trapeze artist of the human experience – walking the highwire between breastbone and solar plexus. He does so with the kinetic energy of someone who must reinvent his songs every time he performs them – so the tempo, rhythm and melody are being dismantled and rearranged before your very eyes like a magician who shows you your card before it vanishes. This porousness to the dynamics of the moment is what makes the music vital and contributes to the inscrutability of his charisma.
And while this might come across as hagiographic or nepotistic, think of it as part of the same impulse which prompted Plato to take dictation at the sandals of Socrates. And, anyway, how much more beautiful it is being able to describe the tornado from its interior than from the storm-shelter.
That said, his new album, Ghosts of American Psychonauts, is taken from a couple of live performances over Valentine’s Day weekend, 2025, at Pico Union Project in Los Angeles. His recent touring band of Jacob Duncan (saxophone/ flute) and Thomas Deakin (electric guitar/ clarinet) have been augmented by previous collaborators Emmett Kelly (bass) and D.V. DeVincentis (saxophone) alongside Ryder McNair (piano), Patrick Shiroishi (saxophone) and the spectacularly named London May (drums). And while that might seem like a lot of woodwind, they combine to transform Trees of Hell from the subdued menace of the album version to an apocalyptic sonic memorial to the recent wildfires which ripped through the Californian hills. Kelly holds down a repeated refrain while the brass section spew magma and Oldham warns against the environmental peril of human folly, like a hallucinating evangelical preacher.
Similar themes of ecological precariousness course through Downstream, albeit with a gentler arrangement. Duncan laces some gorgeous flute lines through Oldham’s vocal, while Nashville country music stalwart David “Ferg” Ferguson provides harmonies and takes a verse with a gnarled, stentorian grace.
Elsewhere, wormholes open in the fabric of reality as London May plays drums on a song called London May – a brooding, hypnotic interrogation of selfhood, which ends with a transfiguring message of affirmation “Yes, you may!” amidst ascending saxophone and piano. Shorty’s Ark is a gorgeous taxonomy of the earth’s creatures which builds to a lathering crescendo, like the film unspooling in the projection room of your life, as Oldham coos “Human beings, cockatoos, elephants and bees/ Your mom’s and dad’s, your penguin birds, your first best friend and me”.
The final track is a reading of Oldham’s most celebrated song – I See A Darkness. Having performed this piece with Oldham many times, I’ve witnessed firsthand its undeniable enchantment. It is a song which has contributed a new word to the vocabulary of music. As such, it feels more than a song – it is a trembling fist shaken in the face of death. Here it grows from a stone to a statue, starting with delicately plucked guitar, then swelling with symphonic emotion, accompanied by elegiac saxophone, minimal piano and crepuscular harmony vocals, leading to the petit morte pay-off lyric “My best, unbeaten brother, this isn’t all I see…. Oh no, I see a darkness.”
They say “never meet your heroes”, but when that person has guided and shaped and confounded and extended your understanding of what music can be, then it becomes a life-defining privilege. They also say “Talent is hitting a target no one else can hit. Genius is hitting a target no one else can see”. The fact that Oldham has eviscerated and recapitulated his own songbook so many times, in such unexpected ways, is a receipt to his genius. Ghosts of American Psychonauts is a compelling addition to this ongoing project of self-actualisation. May it always be.
Ghosts of American Psychonauts (September 18th, 2026) Domino Records