Will Oldham and the Wisdom of Palace
There are some received ideas about Will Oldham, aka Palace/Palace Music/Palace Brothers/Palace Songs, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy, that just won’t seem to die: that he’s a “folk” artist, that he’s all about “Appalachian” music, that he’s an innocent, Bible-thumping soul who somehow stumbled upon the indie-rock world – that he is, in short, some kind of hick or hayseed. He doesn’t exactly discourage them with his image (the crack in his voice, his burning stare, his Old Testament-prophet beard), and his role as a boy preacher in the 1987 film Matewan formed a lot of lasting impressions about him.
But come on. The suggestion that Oldham is some kind of innocent pretechnological savant should’ve been permanently dropkicked by the time he let techno producers Ice remix one of his tracks on the second Macro Dub Infection compilation in 1996. The next year he called a song “Exit Music (For a Dick)” and did a cracked-voiced acoustic cover of AC/DC’s “Big Balls” for a tribute compilation. More recently, he recorded an album with Tortoise, The Brave and the Bold (named after the old Batman team-up series), on which they rework songs by Devo, Elton John and the Minutemen, among others.
What does seem to be true about him is that he loves to defy expectations, to the point where he’s more than a little perverse. The second Palace Brothers album wasn’t called Days in the Wake (1994) until it had already been out for a few months (it was untitled, or self-titled, before that); Arise Therefore (1996) was a Palace album for a few years before it was reclassified as a Will Oldham album. He re-recorded an album’s worth of his best early songs and called it Bonnie “Prince” Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music (2004) – the new identity covering the old.
It’s also pretty clear that names count for a lot with him, which is why he changes the name he records under so often. The name he used for his early records, the Palace Brothers, seems to be derived from the Gram Parsons-founded country-rock band the Flying Burrito Brothers and their one great album, 1969′s The Gilded Palace of Sin. (The way he uses Faun Fables frontwoman Dawn McCarthy’s voice on 2006′s The Letting Go, recalls Emmylou Harris ‘presence on Parsons ‘solo records too.) And “Bonnie ‘Prince ‘Billy” suggests not just Bonnie Prince Charlie but the syntax of Nat “King” Cole, as well as the Purple One, whose song “The Cross” Oldham has been known to cover live.
Of Oldham’s enormous discography, there are only half a dozen albums currently available on eMusic (along with a handful of EPs and compilation tracks – check out the Oldham Brothers ‘peculiar version of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” on Do It Again: A Tribute to Pet Sounds). Fortunately, they include three of his best: the first two Palace Brothers records, and the splendid The Letting Go.
The first Palace Brothers album was 1993′s There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You – a “shot across the bow” kind of record. At a time when the rock underground was trying to be loud, cool and futuristic, or at least a sort of thrift-store retro-chic, Oldham (and the former members of Slint who backed him up in this incarnation of the band) went all the way in the opposite direction. There Is No-One was somber, elegant, buttoned down, steeped in Christian dread, played with the kind of quietness that comes from musicians accustomed to playing much louder. “I Had a Good Mother and Father” is a cover of Washington Phillips ‘late-’20s gospel recording “I Had a Good Father and Mother,” and half of Oldham’s original songs sounded like they could’ve had similar provenance.
The Palace Brothers ‘audience wanted more of the same, of course, so that was the last thing he was going to give them. On the bizarre, brief Days in the Wake, Oldham is pretty much the only audible Brother, and his lingering archaisms (two consecutive songs with “thou” in the title) are about all that’s left in common with There Is No-One. Some of his songwriting is exquisitely simple and timeless, once again (especially “I Am a Cinematographer” and “I Send My Love to You”); some of it is just a mess (“Come a Little Dog” barely counts as a song). The tone of the second album is far more casual than the first on its surface, but Oldham seems to be singing and howling into an empty night, alone and imagining how he might relate to some absent person.
Most of the rest of Oldham’s discography has concerned itself with relationships between people in general, and his collaborators in particular – for someone with an aesthetic as strong and unusual as his, he’s spent a lot of time working with other people with powerful personal aesthetics, from Björk to Johnny Cash. He’s also leaned toward performance and recording situations with unpredictable results. (In 2004, for instance, he appeared in a short film, “Tripping with Caveh,” in which he took psychedelic mushrooms with director Caveh Zahedi, who filmed the result.)
Every so often, though, Oldham comes back from whatever limb he’s been on most recently, and makes a painstakingly crafted, non-experimental, darkly lovely album like The Letting Go, recorded in Iceland with a subdued rock trio augmented in places by a string quartet. (He’s already released three singles from it. Check out, in particular, the Lay & Love EP, which also includes two Bob Dylan covers, both odd but appropriate-for-his-voice selections: “Señor” and “Going to Acapulco.”) Oldham’s been doing what he does now long enough that his eccentricities of voice and persona no longer seem like a reaction against a dominant style of alternative pop, or even a reaction against what he’s done before. Instead, The Letting Go comes across as a record of love songs in the idiom that Oldham has created as his own – sometimes tinged with intimations of mortality, but nonetheless songs of deep connection to a person outside his ineffable self.
