Will Oldham is approaching 20 years in the music business under various guises, and he’s more adaptable than ever, lending his voice to book readings and writing lyrics for David Byrne
SPEAKING TO Will Oldham can feel like speaking to Huckleberry Finn, lost among the hawthorn hedges and sense of nature, so it seems almost wrong to communicate with him by telephone, until his dogs start howling and barking in the background, providing a lovely, natural reality. “Everything’s natural, wouldn’t you say?” he laughingly chimes in.
In truth, Oldham’s openness to happy accidents, and a striving for something meaningful as opposed to facsimiles, has guided his work over the past (almost) 20 years, which is soon to be unofficially marked through Domino’s reissuing of five Palace records in February.
Oldham has recorded under many incarnations, his best known being Bonnie Prince Billy, holding with the idea of biography as muddling, and pseudonym as providing an unbreakable, unifying bond between audience and performer, since all can share in the experience.
“Definitely, and because it makes it a different experience each time.” This bond may be unbreakable, but it is frail, and can hinder or elevate a performance from Oldham, who feels he is constantly circling his voice.
“What I value in other singers is what I try to explore in my own singing. It is so frustrating, often, to find that my voice is reactive, and my performances are reactive. Sometimes I can’t find the strength or harmony that I have found before, if the energy isn’t coming from the other players, or the audience. I am so dependent, and usually very happily so, on other people. Each time a song has begun, it is a new acquaintanceship for me with what the voice is going to be.”
This chasing of a kind of elusive grace makes Oldham not only very special, but well placed to sense that in others, and just as he reveres singular talents as diverse as Frank Sinatra, Merle Haggard and Diamanda Galás, he finds homes for others in his work, like Angel Olsen, who inspires goosebumps on the song Time to Be Clearfrom his most recent record, Wolfroy Goes to Town.
"When Angel did the lyric-less vocal solo in Time to Be Clear,that was one of the highlights of my musical experiences of the last few years, and I knew it right then in the room. It was what I have been trying to achieve with music."
We talk a lot about authenticity, particularly in terms of singers. “Someone will say that something is good because it resembles something else that is good, and we get a little confused at those times. There is that histrionic post-gospel RB vocalisation that we get in those singing contests that are on television, where people come along and take some of the elements of great singers like Aretha Franklin, and fool people into thinking that they are great singers also because they can adapt the styles of those singers who originated the techniques. They take it a little too far. People will give a representation of emotion or power that doesn’t have any emotion or power behind it. That isn’t interesting to me.”
Everything Oldham does comes from a delicate, but compelling impulse – to connect – and it lends itself to a generosity in his music, and choice of collaborators, from Emmett Kelly of The Cairo Gang (with whom he enjoys a musical shorthand) to Trembling Bells (with whom he has just finished a record); but he has also experienced generosity himself, particularly around the time of 2003's Master and Everyone, which was recorded in Nashville, and produced by Lambchop's Mark Nevers, who recruited local session musicians to play.
“It was affirming. It was like something had been decoded; there was a fluency you don’t ordinarily come across. There is a way of digging into a song or elaborating on a theme of a song that is second nature for these musicians, and they made records make sense that until then were sphinx-like with their impermeability.
“I had played shows in Nashville at that point, but had no access to the established musical community and engineers. David Berman of Silver Jews had worked there and had this great experience with Mark, and he pushed me in that direction and I will be ever grateful to him for it.”
The past year has seen Oldham push himself further, whether writing lyrics for David Byrne as part of Paolo Sorrentino's new film This Must Be the Place("a strange and fun collaboration"), or collaborating with Trembling Bells in a singing capacity ("freeing"), or doing public readings of Rudolph Wurlitzer's novel Slow Fade, which in one sense seems like the most difficult project, more exposing somehow.
“I requested that Ben Chasny [Six Organs of Admittance, 200 Years] come along and play music, to have that minimal support when I read, because it is taxing just speaking. Every time I finish I think, ‘argh, I didn’t get it’, because it wasn’t inherent in the text. That is why I love melody, harmony, and rhythm. It is a wild ride getting to sing.”
Bonnie Prince Billy plays Vicar Street tonight
