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Gulf Today
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
The frustrated descendants of the American western
There's nowhere to run to in American films any more. The wide open spaces grow narrower by the day. The once impenetrable forests have been carved up for logging, while the prairies are lost to soybean crops and stripmalls. As for the mountains, forget it — the hiking trails in the summer are as busy as Grand Central Station. The lone explorer nods an awkward hello to all the other lone explorers and pitches his tent every night in designated campsites. The US is no longer a home where the buffalo roam. And if there's nowhere to run, it means there's nowhere to hide. Good One, the fine first feature from writer-director India Donaldson, paints an exacting portrait of America's 21st-century wilderness problem as it shadows a trio of hikers on a weekend jaunt through the Catskills. Donaldson's film is full of moss and mountains, lakes and stars. But it also contains cars and tourists and phones that trill with incoming messages each time their owners climb a hill and get a signal. Newcomer Lily Collias plays teenage Sam, who comes to regret accompanying her amiable dad (James Le Gros) and his best mate Matt (Danny McCarthy) to the woods. Dad, we learn, has just weaselled out of a stressful work project, while Matt is in full, ignominious flight from his marriage. At night, by the tent, the men entertain themselves with campfire horror stories about ruinous divorces and reckless adulteries. Judging by the look on Sam's face, the girl can't wait to get back to her Brooklyn brownstone. If wilderness tourism is a growth industry, it follows that films on the subject should be booming as well. Sure enough, Donaldson's drama joins a burgeoning sub-genre of pictures in which people pack their insect repellent, lace up their boots and prepare to light out for the territories with varying degrees of success (also, it must be said, varying degrees of desperation). It's trudging in the footsteps of Jean-Marc Vallee's Wild (2014), which sent intrepid Reese Witherspoon up the Pacific Crest Trail, and Kelly Reichardt's sublime Old Joy (2006), in which Will Oldham and Daniel London embark on a lugubrious trek to a restorative hot spring in the woods. Somewhere up ahead, surely, lies the wreckage of Sean Penn's grand, fact-based Into the Wild (2007), which memorably came to rest inside a derelict bus in the Alaskan wilds. Alaska — low on people, high on bears – is a magnet for the heroes of these films. It's where the dad in Good One plans to go next year, once he has conquered the Catskills. It's where Jack Nicholson runs to at the end of Five Easy Pieces (1970). Probably these films hail from an altogether older tradition, too, in that they're the frustrated descendants of the Hollywood western. Those classic John Ford and Howard Hawks movies were fictions at best and outright lies at worst, but they came out of an era in which the frontier had only recently closed and it was still possible to imagine a country that was wild and open and ripe for the taking. In casting the American cowboy as a glamorous lone wolf, films such as Stagecoach (1939) and Red River (1948) provided a convenient cover story for all the pretenders who follow and want to view their own lives through rose-tinted glasses. This explains why the itinerant van-dwellers in Chloe Zhao's Oscar-winning Nomadland (2020) are so keen to present themselves as rugged wild west heroes, out riding the plains and living free, even when the reality of their adventure rarely extends beyond the RV park and the Amazon warehouse. It's what allows the city slickers in Good One to play-act the roles of rambling Lewis and Clark, at least until Monday when they are due back at work. One of the best examples of this new breed of thwarted, arrested cowboy tale is Debra Granik's Leave No Trace (2018), a sharp-eyed, heart-piercing account of a father and daughter who have elected to live off-grid in Forest Park, a stretch of woodland just outside Portland, Oregon. Granik's film lifts its title from the National Parks Service guidelines, which instructs hikers and campers to cover their tracks and pick up their litter.
The Independent
28-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Bonnie ‘Prince' Billy on his new album: ‘I wait for something to not feel right'
Early on in the recording of his 22nd studio album, The Purple Bird, Will Oldham – the artist frequently known as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, received some advice from his producer, David 'Ferg' Ferguson. 'You sing, Willy,' he told him. 'You just sing, and everyone's gonna follow you.' At that moment, Oldham was in the studio with a group of session musicians described by Ferguson as 'the best available band in Nashville'; between them, they had worked with artists such as Bob Dylan, John Prine and T Bone Burnett, to name but three. The idea of 'just singing' was as perplexing as it was daunting. After a couple of takes, the singer had a revelation: 'I realised that these were incredible musicians who have a lifetime of experience to work their brilliant minds,' he says. 'And that lifted me up and allowed me to do all the things I sometimes imagine I can do.' Oldham's voice has always been a thing of strange beauty. A haunted loon-call that has carried the peculiarity of his songs with a kind of majesty, and established him as a singular cultural figure. Across more than three decades he has duetted with Johnny Cash, written for Candi Staton and John Legend, and appeared in a Kanye West video. He has covered songs by Mariah Carey, Billie Eilish and country music legend Merle Haggard, undertaken sporadic acting roles (from his early role in 1987's Matewan, to 2023's motorcycle drama The Bikeriders, via Kelly Reichardt's 2006 road movie Old Joy), and was responsible for the cover photograph for cult post-rock band Slint's seminal 1991 album Spiderland. Simultaneously, he has acquired a fanbase that hovers somewhere between devoted and obsessive. We meet the morning after Oldham has played an in-store show at London record store Rough Trade East, and the intensity of the post-set signing line has reminded the singer of what he and his voice represent to his audience. 'I had conversations with 150 people, and each person really was its own world,' he says. If his music sounds otherworldly, in conversation, Oldham is almost disarmingly present. Drinking coffee in a Louisville Folk School shirt, he speaks in a warm, considered tone, and carries himself with a balletic poise. The Purple Bird is only the second time in his career that Oldham has worked with a producer. His relationship with Ferguson dates back over 20 years, to when Johnny Cash covered the Bonnie 'Prince' Billy track 'I See a Darkness' for his album American III: Solitary Man. Ferguson, who had worked in close partnership with songwriter and Sun Records producer Cowboy Jack Clement, John Prine and Cash, was engineer on the record. The pair remained in touch, their lives in Kentucky and Tennessee occasionally overlapping. 'I live a beautiful, easy two-and-a-half-hour drive from where he is,' Oldham says. 'So over the years, any excuse that I could come up with to go down and work with him, I would.' I ask Oldham to describe Ferguson, and he thinks for a moment. 'He works a lot. He's just cut a record with Oliver Anthony. He watches TV. He's had to quit smoking. He has two little chihuahuas,' he says. 'Ferg is a f***ing hard nut to crack. He's ornery and obstinate. But at the same time there's tons of love, and he's one of the most generous and kind human beings that I know.' Over the years, Oldham has come to see how in the light of a new collaboration, his voice can often take on fresh characteristics. 'I'm kind of fascinated with how that seems to work,' he says. 'Because I'll hear the voice that comes out of me when I'm collaborating with different people, and I'll have to step back and say 'Oh, I haven't met this person yet.'' Enjoy unlimited access to 100 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a 4 month free trial (3 months for non-Prime members) Sign up The Purple Bird presented many different kinds of collaboration: with Ferg, with the band, and with an array of classic songwriters the producer had selected to co-write with Oldham, including Tim O'Brien, John Anderson and Roger Cook, whose prolific catalogue includes 'I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)'. Each brought their own new quality to the singer's voice. 'The first song we did was 'Turned to Dust (Rolling On)', and Ronnie Bowman, who I wrote the song with, was there,' Oldham says. 'And I could see dissatisfaction in his face with how I was singing. Ferg said: 'Willy, I think Ronnie wants you to stick closer to the melody.'' The note steered him towards the fundamental challenge of the record: 'How can I make choices but still stick to the melody on these songs?' The result is one of the very best records of Oldham's career, a delicate interplay between emotional restraint, the looseness of songs recorded live, and the sound of an artist thoroughly enjoying himself. In many ways, it is a reflection of recent live shows, where the singer has appeared newly galvanised and more experimental. 'I'm figuring this out these days I think,' he says. 'Because I understand that there is value in restraint, but oftentimes live, I throw it out the window – but I try not to lose it, like late-period Aretha Franklin. I don't want that to happen. I want to use this instrument, the voice, to allow the audience to participate and go somewhere. But at the same time, to realise the voice is the seatbelt as well as the vehicle.' Since 2019's I Made a Place, Oldham has taken a diligent approach to songwriting. Each day he heads to the workspace he keeps near his home, spending a morning session and an evening session going over three to five songs. 'I'll play them, and I'll wait for something to not feel right,' he says. 'I'll think: 'Well why didn't I hear that yesterday…? I think I did hear it yesterday, and I let it slide, for some reason, but I'm not going to let it slide today, I'm going to find the word that actually should go there, or the key that it should be in…'' When he cannot fix the song-problem in his workspace he tries a different tack. 'I'll figure out some sort of activity that I can do, like walking for a mile, and I'll just plug it in, it's like a computer in an old sci-fi TV show,' he says. 'I'll just plug the problem into the brain, start the walk, and halfway through the walk I'll think: 'Well forget it, you're never going to get the word, why don't you just give up?' And at the very end, I'll be almost at home, and I'll think 'How 'bout that?'' He noted a similar diligence and commitment in his co-writers for this record, and found reassurance in the idea that cumulative experience can amount to something substantial. 'It was just realising that one can get better at writing songs,' he says. Later, when he came to play the tracks live, he saw again how robust their compositions were, capable of endless reinterpretation and rearrangement. 'And that was kind of a revelation, to understand how good these songwriters are.' Arguably the finest song on the album, however, is an Oldham original – 'London May', a track that shares a name with the friend who asked him to write a piece of music for a montage scene in his horror movie, Night of the Bastard. It is an improbable kind of pop song, one of looming darkness and devilry, that rhymes 'terrific' with 'horrific'. It is surprising, now, to learn that it began life as an acrostic writing puzzle Oldham set for himself during Covid lockdown – the verses spelling out 'L-O-N-D-O-N' and the choruses 'M-A-Y.' 'I think one of the reasons I did that was you have to stay in shape somehow,' he says. 'And if I'm in shape, I'm fit, then when someone asks me to do a song I'm ready to go.' Oldham first began writing songs in his early twenties, at the behest of his brother and his friends. After a time in Hollywood pursuing a career as an actor, he entered a period of mental turmoil and disillusionment. One day, in the loft he shared with five other people in the then far-from-gentrified Brooklyn, his brother's friend set him a task: 'He said 'What are you doing Will? Why don't you write a song?' So I started to write songs, under his command.' In a period of dislocation, songwriting gave the young Oldham purpose. 'I was unquiet', is how he describes his younger self. 'To the point where there was just so much happening inside, that to have somebody offer this focus, this intention, it was immediate: I just thought, yeah, that's what I should do.' He took a similar approach, then, to writing for, say, Candi Staton or John Legend. 'I was thinking, 'What sort of songs should this person sing?'' he recalls. 'And it was a long, long learning period.' He describes that period of time when he began to release music under the names Palace Brothers and Palace Music, as ''Obviously this is what I need to be doing with my life, but what does that mean?'' He was, he sees now, 'trying to create songs that ultimately Bonnie 'Prince' Billy would sing'. The type of song that Bonnie 'Prince' Billy would sing has perhaps shifted over time. On The Purple Bird, the material ranges from the unabashed pop of his Roger Cook co-write 'One of These Days (I'm Gonna Spend the Whole Night with You)' to a cover of the Clark Sisters' electrifying gospel number 'Is My Living In Vain?' There is, too, an unexpected Oldham original named 'Guns Are For Cowards', which he describes as 'one of the most reactive songs I've ever put together.' 'I wrote it in Kentucky,' he says, 'after there was a two-week period where there were three different things I was supposed to do that were postponed because of gun deaths.' Only when he began to perform the song did he realise it exerted a strange, visceral power upon him. 'My legs would turn to jelly, I would be struggling to get to the end of the song, out of complicated feelings,' he says. 'And I still don't understand what it was that made me feel so weakened.' My legs would turn to jelly, I would be struggling to get to the end of the song, out of complicated feeling He wondered what Ferg might make of it and brought it to their recording sessions. By that time, it had evolved into a subdued solo moment in his live set, and Oldham expected it to offer a similar point of restraint on the album. That day, he and Ferg were recording at Cowboy Jack Clement's house, and he waited as the producer listened through. 'Willy,' Ferg told him when he came to the end, 'there's really only one way we can do this song. And that's as a polka.' Oldham laughs. 'That was thrilling for me. It was not how I would have done it, but he was intently and gleefully pursuing this arrangement. And being right there with Ferg, in Cowboy's studio, in Cowboy's house, I was just like 'I'm in heaven, I'm f***ing in heaven.''
