Will Oldham is a man who delights in the fact of his own artistry. Nowhere is this clearer, perhaps, than in the sheer glee he expresses at working on The Purple Bird, his 30th studio album, his 25th under the moniker Bonnie “Prince” Billy and his first with producer David Ferguson.
Oldham remembers a directive from Ferguson, who also co-wrote seven of The Purple Bird’s songs, when the folkster first ushered him to play: “I don’t wanna make a country record. Just do your shit, Will.” Ferguson is best known for his work with Johnny Cash, “Cowboy” Jack Clement and John Prine—all legends in Oldham’s imagination. No wonder, then, that he allowed Ferguson to be the second-ever producer he has worked alongside.
This is a country album, at a glance. But in the fashion that has come to typify Oldham’s career, the singer’s take on the genre has both a pokey playfulness and a genuine admiration, an insistence on reminding the listener of the tradition he is drawing from and the origins of the pastiches he knows so well that he can near-parody them. Mandolin, banjo and washboard percussion are cleanly spliced atop one another, mixing the down-home country style Oldham nods to with the sharp production he takes advantage of under Ferguson’s watch.
Oldham says of The Purple Bird’s first few singles that “life and music felt right, which it doesn’t always.” The album’s songs embody that ethos in the sort of calm exactitude that accompanies a practiced, perfect demonstration of skill. In “Turned to Dust (Rolling On),” the album’s opener, Oldham enters swinging with a jaunty, self-knowingly simplistic tangle of internal and line rhymes. A female choir accompanies him as he chants, “If we rely on love…things will be alright.” Is it cheesy? Maybe a little, but it’s hard to be mad about it when the song’s so wonderfully, proudly pretty. Really, that Oldham has the guts to make a statement so brashly simplistic compels you to believe him.
The grinning self-assuredness of “Turned to Dust” is not an anomaly: In “Tonight With the Dogs I’m Sleeping,” a rollicking exercise in drunken self-abasement, Oldham crows, “I’m all bark and she’s all bite.” The line is so quintessentially and comfortably Oldhamian that it’s almost surprising the artist hasn’t used it before. The same goes for the winking serenade “One of These Days (I’m Gonna Spend the Whole Night With You),” which would feel almost lazy in its ease if it weren’t so meticulously put together.
In “New Water,” Oldham reveals some of the delicious weirdness that has epitomized his singular oeuvre. Judeochristian imagery—“it’s the water that can wash your whole life away”—mixes into the dark primordial ooze one imagines Oldham himself arose from (in the album promo photos, the singer sort of looks like the Tiger King if he got shot into orbit.) This admixture of genre staples and lived-in oddity define Oldham’s best work, and it’s used expertly in the best parts of this album.
Not every song on The Purple Bird is smirking. “Downstream,” a John Anderson collaboration purposefully reminiscent of the country singer’s 1996 duet with Merle Haggard, “The Winds of Change,” is a straightforward folk plea for awareness of the catastrophes humanity keeps foisting onto itself. Anderson’s addition—a practiced, meditative final verse—is the album’s most explicit effort to identify itself in a long tradition of acoustic Americana.
This is all to say that The Purple Bird does not shirk cliché. Instead, it revels in it, making use of the traditions of the folk genre in a dozen trimly sliced three-and-a-half minute forays that demonstrate such a calm, practiced expertise that the listener is compelled to appreciate them at face value. The album puffs out its chest, and unabashedly so. Listening to it, you’ll feel a little urge to do the same: As Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Oldham sounds so in his element that, really, it’s hard not to join in the fun.
Miranda Wollen lives in New York and attends school in Connecticut, but you can find her online @mirandakwollen.
