Latest news with #ThePurpleBird
CBC
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Will Oldham recalls how he ended up conducting Johnny Cash in the recording booth
Will Oldham has been a Johnny Cash fan for almost his entire life. He remembers listening to Cash's music with his older brother when they were just four or five years old. So imagine his surprise when he got the chance to work with Cash in 2000. Last month, Oldham released The Purple Bird, his 22nd album under the moniker Bonnie "Prince" Billy. The record was produced by his friend David Ferguson, whom he first met 25 years ago during his serendipitous recording session with Cash. In an interview with Q 's Tom Power, Oldham explains how that "bizarre and wonderful opportunity" to work with Cash came about. It all started when producer Rick Rubin picked out his song I See a Darkness as a potential track for Cash to cover on American III: Solitary Man, the third album in the music legend's American series. "They were casting a net after exploring the possibilities with the first American record and plumbing the depths of what Cash had to offer," Oldham tells Power. "Rubin, I think, picked out that song, put it on a tape I found later from June Carter Cash, sent the tape to John and June, and they would listen to the songs and review them." Oldham learned some time later that when Carter Cash heard his song, she turned to her husband and told him he had to record it. So after getting the go-ahead from Cash, Rubin approached Oldham backstage at one of his shows and invited him to play piano on Cash's cover. "The only thing I can think to say is, 'Yes, I will do that,'" Oldham recalls. "He gives me his phone number and I guiltily call him the next day and say that I don't know how to play the piano. "[But] I got my foot in the door and I just said, 'So I can't play piano. I understand anything could happen with this. Whatever. If there's any way I could just turn this moment into the chance to meet John and June.' And he was very sweet and very gracious and said, 'OK, in a couple of weeks there's a session. You're welcome to come.'" When Oldham eventually turned up to the session, Rubin immediately introduced him to Cash as the songwriter behind I See a Darkness. "Johnny Cash incredibly, unbelievably, mind-blowingly said, 'Well, let's work on that song right now then,'" Oldham says. "He explained to me that he loved the song but had issues with the way he was singing it and didn't feel confident…. They even played me his scratch vocal take, as they say, and I could not hear anything but greatness, you know? But if it's going to expand my time with Johnny Cash, I'm going to pretend I see some problems in there. I'm like, 'OK, let's work on this.'" Oldham ended up doing a guide vocal for Cash to sing along to, which led to someone suggesting that he conduct Cash beside him in the vocal booth. "What can you feel? What would you feel?" Oldham tells Power. "Anything you can imagine you would feel is what I was feeling. It's using a significant portion of my conscious energy to suppress disbelief."
The Independent
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
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.
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.''
