Like a roadhouse bartender, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy serves familiar comforts and soaks up the world’s strange spillages on his new album
The Purple Bird – Will Oldham’s 22nd album as Bonnie “Prince” Billy – may be one of the warmest, mellowest country-pop releases of recent years, but that doesn’t stop him using it to vent a little spleen about modern America. Over the porch-swing sway of opening track “Turned to Dust (Rollin On)”, he laments a nation “tempted by the lure of a liar, who preys on the foolish and the weak”. Later, against the farty brass parp and accordion lurch of a polka called “Guns Are for Cowards”, he asks listeners: “If you could do it without anyone saying that you’d committed a crime/ Who would you shoot in the face?/ Who would you shoot in the brain?/ Who would you shoot in the back?” More curious is his follow-up question: “Then how would you feel?/ Exalted? Or destroyed?”
Produced by David “Ferg” Ferguson (best known for engineering Johnny Cash’s later albums and producing John Prine) and recorded with some of the most seasoned session musicians in Nashville, The Purple Bird is reassuringly well-crafted and woodsy. Musicians assembled at the restored studio of Cowboy Jack Clement – who started out engineering/producing for the likes of Elvis Presley Sun Records – and slotted into an easy groove.
Fiddle solos slide like dovetail joints into heel-tapped beats; smoothly planed pedal-steel notes curl over the grain of sleepy strumming; banjo and mandolins skip across washboards; brushed drums saw into the sigh of backing vocals. There’s soft-shoe, last-dance romance on “Spend the Whole Night With You” as Oldham winks: “Instead of seeing me off, you might just wanna turn me on.”
The jaunty “Tonight with the Dogs I’m Sleeping” sits squarely on its 4/4 beat while Oldham has fun tipping his throat back and howling: “I’m all bark and she’s all biiiiiiiite.” Co-written with country great John Anderson, “The Water’s Fine” chugs along merrily in the tyre tracks of well-worn Nashvillian chord progressions, as Anderson’s companionable voice joins Oldham’s from the passenger seat. The lovely, lullsome “Boise, Idaho” floats by like a Southern breeze, with its watercolour washes of backing vocals by Brit Taylor and Adam Chaffins.
Sometimes, though, the practised ease of the band and the safe song structures mean that tracks can slip into the background. More striking is “London May”. A collaboration with the drummer of the same name from punk-goth band Samhain, it rises up from a dramatic piano hook – the kind that wouldn’t be out of place in a Bond theme song. Over some gnarly electric guitar and an occasionally ominous drum pattern, the 55-year-old father of two sorrowfully (and acrostically) observes:
“Love
Overcomes
Nothing
Despite
One’s
Needs.”
Oldham is consistently groping for a wider perspective. He sings of screaming at the stars; his own smallness in the context of seas, sunsets and centuries. On “Sometimes it’s Hard to Breathe”, Oldham stretches his voice high and wobbly to assure us that: “Though the constant implied threat of violence/ Eats away at our precious loving time/ We can make it for a while.”
An emotional, sun-cracked Anderson joins him again on “Downstream”, a post-apocalyptic lullaby on which the pair agree: “We live in the ruins of another life’s dream.” It’s a classic country slice of campfire wisdom. As is the bumper-sticker lyric: “You’re only as good as the people you know”, from the yee-haw singalong closer “Our Home” featuring Tim O’Brien.
By sticking close to cosy genre format, The Purple Bird gives Oldham a framework for vocalising painful 21st-century truths with sly, stark wit. Like a roadhouse bartender, he serves familiar comforts and soaks up the world’s strange spillages before sending you on your way with a wave.
