Manning Up For Bonnie

My fingers hit the keys, one after another, each doing their part to write a hope I knew I couldn’t properly cover. I wanted it, and I knew that if I got my “wanted it,” I’d be an apprehensive mess. Round and round my head spun: to step up and be a man or to stand down and be my usual apathetic myself. Or something. “Send” was the last click I committed to before allowing myself to rest a few hours before the impending workday. I’d completed the kind of e-mail I could only dream up in hazy late night hours. I woke up the next morning after what felt like a dozen or more protracted dreams, all about – you guessed it – falling on my face. Heroes chasing me into holes with bright red cast-iron words laced with mockery and disdain. I came to my morning senses the best I could, looked in the mirror and saw it scribbled in reverse on my forehead in red ink, etched as if to look like blood: EDtR. Ease Down the Road. A music column, sure, but something more, too. An album. An album by an artist whose work I’ve lived in close proximity to for nearly a decade now. My day went on, me checking my e-mail every 30 minutes, hoping the daring keystrokes I let loose the night before had found their lucky place. “I know my way around the world / It’s a circle and it starts and it ends,” wails Will Oldham on his latest Bonnie “Prince” Billy album, Lie Down in the Light, an organic summer album full of memorable lyrics and glowing vocals. I sing along loudly, as if my quick familiarity with the song matters to anyone aside from myself. When speaking of current songwriters, Oldham is my guy – a fact made clear by the majesty I’ve already found in Lie Down in the Light. I love the Adams and the Berman and the Tweedy and the others, but Oldham is unquestionably the one who has been burning me (and, in many ways, supporting me) the deepest through my 20s – his voice at once burly and vulnerable and his words open and pure without ever peeking out from beyond their cryptic facade; his weird, sometimes hair-raising little heart burning bright through every word, photo, film, song and video he produces. I’ve requested – and been granted and later conceived – many interviews in my day, but none with anyone I feel so close to. (Those interested in checking out some of my recent interviews can do so on Ease Down the Road’s anything but pretty online archive, linkable from the left hand side of whatzup.com’s homepage.) All that said, and with the dudes from NIPR’s Little Brother Radio hoisting me in the air, I sent the request. It was about 3 a.m., if I recall, making it a suicide mission of sorts.

Easy. “Sure, let’s do it. When are you available?” wrote Oldham’s winged publicist. After some time negotiations and general feeling out it was on; three days after sending that fated e-mail I was to talk on the phone with the man for whom I named my column. Sounds like a dream, but it happened. Joined by Bonnie-minded friends Lee Miles and Jon Keller, as well as LBR host Rob Wood, Oldham and I recorded just under an hour of talk last week. It happened. Easy, but more on that later.

Plug time. For the last few months I’ve been posting album reviews, feature stories, columns and, most notably, interviews on Ease Down the Road Online, all for the sake of the folks out there who just can’t get enough. Want to reread EDtR’s thoughts on how to save the fading Sound World? It’s on there. Want to review EDtR’s most wanted songs and albums of 2007? On there. Remember that one time EDtR came out with middle fingers, bad jokes and a bloody tongue? It’s on there, as are a load of long-form album reviews, 10 or so feature stories concerning both local- and national-level bands, plenty of rant-filled columns and some choice interviews, including time spent with Basia Bulat, Josh Ritter, Eef Barzelay, Patterson Hood and, most recently, Magnolia Electric Co.’s Jason Molina.

In addition to the upcoming Oldham talkathon – set to premier in edited form during LBR’s 9 p.m.-midnight broadcast on Saturday, June 14 (that’s 89.1 on the FM dial for you shameful LBR newbies out there) – we are also working on a few additional interviews with folks like Phil Elverum (The Microphones, Mount Eerie), Ray Raposa (Castanets) and Silver Jews frontman David Berman, who will do a pair of interviews with EDtR, one of which should also be aired by those always-busy-building-a-scene Brothers.

Back to the Dark Prince. For starters, if you don’t know any of Oldham’s work, well, let’s just say I’ve been told that he’s not always very easy to get into. Over the last two decades he has released a stack of records under a number of monikers – most frequently Palace, Will Oldham or Bonnie “Prince” Billy – as skyscraping as the joint sum of any three of his contemporaries, never once repeating himself. There’s the poetic fumblings of Days in the Wake; the rumbling Americana of Viva Last Blues; the verbose indie-rock of Joya; the emotional precision of the very aphotic I See a Darkness; the minimalist beauty and craft-defining mastery of Master and Everyone; the string-laced grandiose love of The Letting Go; and now, finally, the sturdy hopefulness and brotherly warmth of Lie Down in the Light – the most candid and unfolding stack of records on the planet. There are other albums, but far too many to mention. Most of Oldham’s work is very much worth checking out, but probably not before you spend time with the above-mentioned classics.

Writen by G. William Locke