What else can you say about Bonnie Prince Billy that hasn’t been said already? He has a fabulously lush mustache. He writes beautiful songs that creep you out and break your heart. And he has a bunch of interesting friends who gather in the woods to do weird stuff with fans and fabric.
The prince says, “I believe that it is apparent that this piece of work is a celebration of gratitude and collective action. It’s a multi-generational, cross-discipline effort with implicit resonances into shared pasts and presents. I met director Ray Tintori when he was a small child and I was a slightly larger child. Participating in this visualization of ‘Crazy Blue Bells’ with Tintori, producer Julia Simpson, and a massive consortium of creatives is a joy of my life.”
It wasn’t that long ago that our bonnie prince was extolling the virtues of blueberries. (Actually, it was five years…jeez, the pandemic really warped our sense of time!) These days he’s into bananas.
Or is he? As he sings about “how well we fit together” and “filling every hole” with something “harder than the cold,” your mind may start to wander beyond the produce section…
A statement describes the songs as “a blue ballad of devotion, doubly crossed with mystery and mischief. Over spartan guitar figures reminiscent of the now-classic Master and Everyone production style, Bonny’s call-n-response with Dane Waters passes the love around until flowers bloom forth from the desert, cracks in the sidewalk, Mars.” Indeed.
Sometimes a banana is just a banana. This is not one of those times. (And for the record, he might not have been singing about blueberries back then either: “I’ll eat your blueberries and you eat mine.”)
Directed by Ben Berman. Single out now on Drag City.
It’s David Berman week, apparently. Yesterday, we featured the video for a song by a member of what was supposed to be Berman’s touring incarnation of Purple Mountains, and today we have a cover of a Silver Jews classic by his Drag City labelmates and his widow.
Bill Callahan and Will Oldham have been releasing covers of classic tunes throughout the pandemic. My favorite of these has been their version of Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues” but this one’s pretty good too.
They recruited an army of singers for it. In addition to Cassie Berman, they’ve also got Elisa Ambrogio, Meg Baird, Ben Chasny, Bill MacKay, Haley Fohr, David Grubbs, Cory Hanson, Emmett Kelly, Matt Kinsey, Sean O’Hagan, David Pajo, Todd Rittmann, Alasdair Roberts, Matt Sweeney, Mick Turner, George Xylouris, Azita Youssefi. That’s like half the Drag City roster!
Callahan says, “The infrastructure of this song should set an example to politicians of all type—everybody sings of wild kindness.”
Not sure it can hold a candle to the original but it was probably cathartic to record and maybe even fun. The video is hilariously silly.
It’s easy to hate Steely Dan when you’re an angry young person. The music is slick and perfect and the lyrics are mean and condescending. It sounds so adult. None of that reckless teenage abandon that makes rock and roll fun and exciting.
But you know what eventually changes your perspective? The Cuervo Gold and the fine Colombian…
These days I can’t even imagine not loving the Dan. Walter Becker and Donald Fagan are hilarious, and that’s something I didn’t pick up on when I was a kid. I even respect Michael McDonald now, which is something I never would’ve believed I’d admit. And it’s not some silly ironic enjoyment of “yacht rock.” They sound great. What’s not to love?
Clearly Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy feel the same way. Here, they take on Becker and Fagan’s tale of a suburban loser who wishes he was a hip jazz cat with a cool nickname, and it’s beautiful.
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues
Callahan’s broken baritone embodies the character of the narrator perfectly. In the original version Fagan makes you smirk at the guy’s chutzpa, but Callahan makes you feel genuinely sorry for him. What more could you ask for?
Middle age is tough. It’s hard to keep a good attitude when you see your body and the world falling apart. Our bonnie prince, who just turned 50 last week, understands this but offers hope:
Though half of life is gone for good
And we haven’t acted as we should
You feel it in your heart of wood
That this is far from over
Will Oldham knows there’s even hope in the world’s inevitable apocalypse:
Don’t worry if all life is gone
The rocks and sea will still roll on
And new wild creatures will be born
As this is far from over
That’s right, folks. We might be well on our way to rendering our planet uninhabitable, but guess what: Earth doesn’t care. It will carry on long after all of the humans, plants, and animals are killed off. And then it will start over. Or not. It will continue to orbit the sun, happy finally to be rid of all the monsters who have been torturing it for the past 250 years.
The video offers an optimistic vision of an alternate reality, where folks can be free from the horrors of humanity and commune with nature. A life at sea. Yo ho ho.
“This Is Far From Over” features and was edited by Captain Olivia O Wyatt. She just completed a solo transpacific crossing from San Diego to Hawaii on her 34 ft. boat, Juniper. The voyage lasted 23 days and was chronicled on her blog Wilderness of Waves. From Hawaii, she will sail around the world to destinations guided by humpback whale migration patterns. As Olivia traverses the sea, she is creating an ethnographic film exploring the mystery of humpback whale songs from the perspective of indigenous communities who revere them as deities.
Directed by Jacob Forman. From I Made A Place, due November 15 on Drag City and Palace Records.
Heck yeah! The fact that the world is doomed isn’t going to bring down our Bonnie Prince, no sirree. He’s already gearing up for the post-apocalypse with a jangly Cosmic American jam that wouldn’t sound out of place on The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark.
When we hear the frogs again we’ll be set to raise our heads
And it won’t matter then if the rest of the world is dead.
Yes between you and me we’ve got a re-population kit
The world will rise again from the back of the pit.
And there’s a new album on the way, too, the first new collection of Will Oldham originals since 2011’s Wolfroy Goes To Town. Oldham says, “In recent years, the whole world of recorded music, in the way that such music is conceived, perceived, recorded, released and distributed, has been atomized. I tried holding my breath, waiting for the storm to pass, but this storm is here to stay and its devastation is our new landscape. What else is a person to do except what he knows and feels, which for me is making records built out of songs intended for the intimate listening experiences of wonderful strangers who share something spiritually and musically? I started working on these songs thinking that there was no way I was going to finish them and record and release them. This was a constructive frame-of-mind that protected the songs until this frightening moment when we let go of them and give them to you.”
We rarely–like…never–just copy and paste shit from a press release. I mean, what would the point be? A press release is background info; just something to start the story and maybe provide a quote. But this passage we just got from Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s camp is just too good to not share:
Bonny Billy and Lady Billy were living on the rim of the active volcano Kilauea (way back in January, when Halema’uma’u was still a lava lake). They woke one morning to the news that a ballistic missile attack was underway, coupled with the advisory that they should “take immediate shelter” (?!). Thirty minutes later, the warning was rescinded, but not before some serious synapse paths were re-mapped. What could they do with such a soul-jostling? Fortunately, they had friends. Friends who had supplied them with THC-laced chocolate covered blueberries. Bonny sat down and scribbled out a paean to these blueberries, to all blueberries, then closed his notebook and that was that. A couple of weeks later, a call came from Chris Garcia, of the legal weed boutique Hi Fidelity in Berkeley. He wanted to open his shop in style, and thought that maybe a collab with the ‘Prince’ would help. Bonny re-opened the notebook and cranked out a jammer, a fruit-filled jammer to end all fruit-filled endeavors. He brought the song to Nashville where, under the guidance of dear friend and colleague David “Fergie” Ferguson, the song was brought to mouth-watering life. Also on hand to make dreams into reality were guitarist Matt Sweeney and drummer Pete Townsend. Back in Kentucky, Tim Morton conceived and executed the video clip that makes us, all of us, smile.
It would be easy to laugh this off as a gag…a lark. That’s what happens with absurdism. But just as Tina Fey told us to eat more sheet cake, there’s a logic and a purpose in acknowledging that we’re living in madness…with madness. Also, blueberries fucking rule.
Will Oldham is a creepy mother fucker. I won’t at all be surprised to find out that he’s a time traveling folky/murderer who dips in and out of various decades singing about who knows what but creeping us all out just the same. And that’s why I love him: He confuses me to no end. He’s like a living David Lynch film.
In “Treasure Map” we hear Oldham’s voice over video of some woman wandering around a mountain forest, but I don’t know why. It’s probably because I am not as smart as I was when I was younger and enjoyed Lynch. I still enjoy Bonnie Prince Billy even if I have no idea why.
