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.’”
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.’”
‘The Purple Bird’ by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy is out this Friday
