Video: Bonnie Prince Billy – “Crazy Blue Bells”

Directed by Ray Tintori. From Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, out August 11 on Drag City.

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.”

Video: Bonnie Prince Billy – “Bananas”

Video made by Ethan Osman. From Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, out August 11 on Drag City.

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.”)

Video: Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – “This is Far From Over”

From I Made A Place, out January 31 on Drag City.

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.

Sail on, sister. Sail on.

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