For more than 30 years, Will Oldham has been a singular presence in American music. After pumping the brakes on a burgeoning teenage acting career and decamping to his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, Oldham did some woodshedding to rethink what he might want to do with his life. High on this list was creating music and writing songs with friends from the fertile Louisville music scene. He made a series of folk and country-adjacent recordings under the Palace moniker in the mid 1990s and released an album under his own name before hitting on a stage name that stuck.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy announced his presence to the world with the 1998 single “One With the Birds,” soon followed with an album that would alter the course of his music career and life. I See a Darkness remains a striking collection of songs, starkly recorded in a rehabbed barn on family land outside Louisville. It would have likely brought him new listeners even if its title track hadn’t been recorded by Johnny Cash, who was then in the midst of a late career revival. Oldham found himself invited by producer Rick Rubin to play piano on the track and agreed, even though he wasn’t adept at the instrument. He attended the session anyway, to help guide Cash’s vocals. Oldham found himself singing on the haunting track, introducing him to a much wider audience than he could have imagined when he originally recorded it.
Oldham’s been wildly prolific and unpredictable ever since, trying out all sorts of collaborators and instrumentations to bolster his songs. As I See a Darkness turns 25 this year, I asked Oldham if this made him reflect on that time in his life, or if any sort of reissue was planned.
“Definitely no plans for bonus tracks or anything like that,” he says. “I’ve never understood why people think ‘This is a really good thing let’s fuck with it.’ And yeah, that album is hugely important to my life, but I’m doing all I can to manage the Now. For several years I was overseeing the care of my mom, who had dementia and died in 2020. I talked at length about I See a Darkness on a podcast called Life of the Record and that was enough of a celebration.”
“My music is streaming now, but I still don’t understand it. People rebel against Wal-Mart because it ruins small, local businesses. But what is Spotify if not the Wal-Mart of music?”
A big part of focusing on the Now is trying to get his latest record, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, into as many ears as possible. One strategy for this involved inviting his friend, Louisville-based film archivist and filmmaker Ryan Daly, to create visual accompaniment for each of the album’s 12 songs, sourced from Daly’s vast archive of 16mm films. It’s an unusual approach by a musician who has only sporadically made music videos, but, as always with Oldham, there was a specific, well-considered intent behind the project.
“My wife and I were listening to mixes of the record and appreciating the way it sounded,” Oldham explains. “Nick Roeder is pretty alchemical in capturing and reproducing strong natural sound, it was so exciting. I don’t normally think about records in these terms, but I just knew that most people wouldn’t give themselves the opportunity to free oneself from distraction and listen to it how it should be heard. Nobody really listens to records the way they used to, and I wanted to force people to be in a position to listen to it all the way through. I thought, how can we make this happen and what I wanted was a cinematic space. So Ryan and I worked on this film and booked the theater of the fantastic Speed Art Museum here in Louisville, and it’s since played in cinemas around the U.S. and Europe and is now on the Criterion Channel.”
Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You couples with 2019’s I Made a Place to form a pair of very adult albums grappling with the often scary state of the world and the growing uncertainties we all face. Though Oldham is no stranger to existential musings (his first album bore the title There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You) the songs he’s been writing of late reflect more outward concerns than the man who authored 1996’s anguished breakup album Arise Therefore. These albums also follow a period when Oldham’s songwriting productivity had slowed a bit.
From 2013 to 2018, Oldham recorded a series of cover albums of songs by the Everly Brothers, The Mekons, Merle Haggard and even himself. He also assembled a band to tour small venues and perform the brilliant if obscure Kevin Coyne and Dagmar Krause 1979 album Babble in its entirety. In that time he released one album and one EP of his own songs, a small ripple for a prolific artist who for two decades released an album or two a year. I wondered if that dearth of new songs might have had to do with a busy life, a new wife and child and caring for an ailing parent, or if the banalities of aging had possibly changed his relationship with his songwriting. Nothing of the sort, Oldham insists.
“At the time it felt like I was trying to look at the landscape. There’s that tired old metaphor that songs are like children, and I thought it was a terrible time to bring children into the world. When I look at online streaming, it seems so harsh and destructive and hurtful. Why would I write and release songs in this atmosphere? At the same time, people were turning to that, listening to most of their music on these platforms. And navigating all of recorded music history is no small task. Like with the Everly Brothers, a lot of people just know ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ or those early records. So the cover records were meant to be a sort of musical education, pointing to certain things and helping people navigate murky waters.
“My music is streaming now, but I still don’t understand it. People rebel against Wal-Mart because it ruins small, local businesses. But what is Spotify if not the Wal-Mart of music? But the past few years of making music have been exciting for me, like that record I made with Bill Callahan.”
In December 2021, Oldham and Bill Callhan released Blind Date Party, an album of covers with musical backing from different Drag City labelmates on each track. It was a clever conceit and an even better record, oddly celebratory and touching heading into year two of the covid pandemic. One song was especially welcome, “The Wild Kindness,” by Silver Jews, the music project of poet and songwriter David Berman, who had taken his own life the year prior. Before hearing this record, it had somehow never occurred to me how my adulthood had been shadowed by these three songwriters. After the album’s release, a group of friends and I discussed how we’d had been listening to Oldham, Callahan and Berman, since they first came on the scene in the early 1990s, when they and we were in our early 20s, and had continued to listen to them as they navigated adulthood as we did. It seems like a rare thing these days to follow an artist over three decades, and I asked Oldham if there was anyone he thinks of in these terms.
“Hm, that’s a good question,” he muses. “Of course Merle Haggard and The Mekons. They were older, but even as a kid I think I liked listening to records made within five years of my age. And you appreciate records made by older people as you get older. But I’m aware how as people get older life gets in the way and how society is age-denying. Older artists aren’t respected as much. I’m very close to the Drag City artists you mentioned and watch how they work. It’s often somewhat lonely to look around and see there aren’t people sticking it out as long as some of my peers are and exploring these glorious years. A lot of musicians are destroyed by circumstances before they get the opportunity to explore these years. But it’s wonderful to have the ability to watch someone’s development.”
Oldham is generally not a fan of attending or performing at music festivals, but has a soft spot for Big Ears. Having toured solo the past few years because of Covid, he’s looking forward to performing with a band, though he’s not yet sure who all will be in it.
“After playing solo for so long because of the risk of infections, I started to get lonely and feel safer about Covid, so I invited Thomas Deakin to come play accordion with me, and I’m hoping to rope in four or five or six people to join me. It’s so cool because so many people I know will be there, Bitchin Bajas and Joan Shelley and Shahzad Ismaily and Faun Fables and other people. It will be great to see people.”
