Though his deep catalogue is as strange and bottomless as the American songbook that inspired him, Will Oldham has been more reflective in recent years. Following the release of 2011’s austere Wolfroy Goes to Town, he’s assumed the most old-school responsibilities of folk musicians: collaborating with friends, reimagining old songs, and quietly releasing new music. Best Troubador, his new 2xLP tribute to Merle Haggard, is not his first covers album. In 2013, he paid homage to the Everly Brothers with Dawn McCarthy on What the Brothers Sang, and just last year, he covered the Mekons with Angel Olsen on Fantastic Voyage. Of the three artists, Haggard seems like the best fit for present day Bonnie “Prince” Billy: a singular force who found a way to age gracefully by following his own path—refusing to be pinned down even as he slows down.
Best Troubador, despite taking source material from one of country music’s boldest voices, does not end Oldham’s quiet streak. It’s a somber, contemplative record, less indicative of the bars and honky tonks associated with Haggard than the wine-stained carpets and dimly lit living rooms of Wolfroy. And while Haggard’s diverse body of work is filled with fight songs and jukebox singalongs, Oldham’s 17-song selection is tight-knit and intimate. The set opens with “The Fugitive,” previously a freewheeling acoustic number that played like a blueprint for the following year’s “Branded Man.” It’s one of the only compositions here that Oldham embellishes upon, introducing the record with snappy momentum. The instrumentation on the album—adorned with saxophones and flutes, pedal steel and fiddles—helps highlight the particular way Oldham’s voice has evolved. His pipes have grown deeper and reedier, but somehow—in an almost actorly way—he sounds youthful. During a loose, lo-fi rendition of “If I Could Only Fly” at the end of the record, you can hear the tender cracks in his voice that defined his early Palace Brothers records.
While the tracklist was thoughtfully considered—centered on Haggard’s themes of self-identification and contentment—the pacing sometimes drags a bit with a bevy of mid-tempo cuts. Oldham’s attempts to switch things up pay off well. Mary Feiock’s guest vocal on “Nobody’s Darling” is a highlight; her crystal clear falsetto reflects a tenderness that Haggard’s stoicism often belied. Oldham also succeeds by adjusting Haggard’s songs slightly, embedding them with the cryptic humor that dots his own catalogue. While retaining a nearly identical arrangement to the original, he twists Haggard’s late career anthem “I Am What I Am” with just his vocal performance, adding a slight stutter to subvert one of its more trad-country sentiments (“I believe Jesus is god/And the pig is just ham”). In “What I Hate (Excerpt),” Oldham refines Haggard’s laundry list of modern grievances to a single line about chemtrails—a surreal anachronism on an album that’s unabashedly old-fashioned.
The tribute album is a long-standing tradition of country music, one that was employed by Merle Haggard for his own heroes like Bob Wills and Elvis Presley. With Best Troubador, Oldham reflects the format’s most expressive tendencies—to filter an artist’s work through the lens of your fandom. Through these songs, Oldham’s appreciation for Haggard seems to stem less from his innovation within the genre than for his patient evolution and longevity. The sentiment is reflected by the song choice, which highlights obscure late-career numbers like the gorgeous “That’s the Way Love Goes” over more celebrated material like “Mama Tried” (relegated to a non-album single, with vocal duties handed off to a band member). And while all of Oldham’s work can be pilfered for meaning, Best Troubador is all the better for its simplicity: “The goal with this record is to highlight a life spent obsessed with songs and with singing them,” Oldham has said. It’s an obsession that’s defined both artists’ careers, and a sentiment reflected throughout these warm, lived-in performances.
