2007’s Greatest Palace Music featured highlights from Oldham’s formative gothic folk offerings under the Palace Music banner reimagined by some of the sharpest session musicians America’s country music capital has to offer.
Whereas that project could resemble the outcome of a dare to produce a particularly unlikely addition to endlessly prolific Oldham’s sprawling catalogue, The Purple Bird lands like a proper ‘Nashville album’. Produced and largely cowritten by David ‘Ferg’ Ferguson (whom Oldham met when Johnny Cash covered his doom-laden evergreen "I See a Darkness" 20-odd years ago), and featuring a handful of notable country veteran guests (who also pitch in on the songwriting), the album cheerily embraces various stock tropes and scenarios of country songs past and present (tipsily shabby drinking song? Check. Woebegone weepie named after a US town? Check. Longing and cheating? Check. Song written around a commonplace phrase? check). There’s also a commitment to the craft that has propelled many a country classic: rather than waiting around for divine inspiration to strike, Oldham and collaborators would meet at designated times for scheduled writing sessions, armed with little more than their instrument, ideas and pen and paper.
Although Oldham and co. wisely sidestep the most
excessively lavish Nashville decorations (there are no gloopy strings,
choirs, excessive fiddling or perhaps surprisingly even pedal steel
here) and stick to the rootsier and more organic ends of the endlessly
mutable country idiom, these rich but economic arrangements can sound
almost indecently lavish after the extemporaneous kitchen table folk
picking of 2023’s Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You.
There are tunes here that could easily pass off as vintage
standards. The beautifully bruised doubt and confusion of "Boise, Idaho"
(hints of Guy Clark, maybe) packs a, well, country song’s worth of
tears and regret, while the closing secular hymn "Our Home" sounds like
it could have been lurking around since the glory days of country music
mecca Grand Ole Opry (situated in Nashville, obviously). The homebound
drunkard’s lament "Tonight With The Dogs I’m Sleeping" teeters giddily
on the edge of corniness, but the brisk rural funk of the execution is
fit to silence dissenting. You may well wish for more of the depth,
ambiguity and melodic yearning of "London May" when faced with the
oompah-style moral parable "Guns Are For Cowards", however.
Executed with palpable warmth and affection for the musical
heritage that hovers behind these songs, what could have been an
unconvincingly superficial genre exercise emerges as another winningly
inviting Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album.
