Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

(April 2009)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Previously published on ARTISTdirect

Will Oldham has been unflinching in his personal explorations of the human psyche, but when it comes time to publicly explore the process and meaning behind his work as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, he’s been more reticent.  In fact, he may soon be done with it altogether.   That’s what he suggests – with a hopeful tone in his voice – while in the midst of a serious press tour for his latest album, Beware.  He’s cultivated a rabidly loyal following over the past 15-plus years, and crossover mainstream attention has never been on the agenda.  Perhaps he doesn’t need the dog and pony show anymore. 

For now, though, Oldham is at the trendy, Moroccan-themed Figueroa Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, making good on a promise to his label to pull out the promotional stops for Beware, an album that’s pitched as his “biggest and most ambitious.”  Oldham quickly shoots that claim down as “Barnum-esque.”  Self-promotion clearly – and refreshingly – isn’t his strong suit.

I read the New Yorker profile on you [one of the first major pieces of press on Beware].  That piece kept returning to your trepidation about doing the piece, and it closed on that same note.  When it’s all said and done and on the stands, do you seek it out to see how the finished product turned out?

Sometimes.  A piece like that, I didn’t read it all the way through because it’s mostly his work, you know?  And I don’t really care about his work.  But if it’s something like this, then I feel like I can read it and try to figure out how to be clearer with my speech.  In a case like that, he’s observing all different things and drawing different lines together, and I can’t do anything about that.  But if I do another conversation like this, I can learn something from the printed piece.

I’ve never done one of those immersive pieces where I go to someone’s house and come back for coffee the next day and make sense of their world in 5,000 words.

It’s very strange.

Very strange, I can imagine.  But, to be fair, I thought that piece was fairly well done.  One thing that I found interesting in it is that you’d told Drag City that you weren’t going to do press for your last record but dangled the carrot even back then that you’d do the whole thing for this record.  Was Beware done already by that point?

No, not yet.

So it could have wound up being a more minimalist or less accessible record?

Yeah, there’s no way of knowing exactly.  But I figured that I would take whatever work was going to be required of me into consideration maybe even when I was making the record – and make something that was external and involved other people.

You have such a long-standing relationship with Drag City that I imagine them just saying “As you will.”

They… do.  It’s always a back-and-forth.  They always have lots of encouragement about certain ideas.  It’s a lot of presenting ideas and arguing them out, with every record.

With the sort of big ensemble that appears on Beware, how much shape-shifting occurs once the musicians get together? 

Well, on this record, all the songs were recorded – except for one song that was recorded with just Josh and I – but all the songs were recorded with drums/percussion, bass, fiddle, guitar, my voice and sometimes my guitar – like that.  And then everything else on there was people coming in and playing on top of it.  So it was always this five-person ensemble, and then from the moment it was done – even before it was done – we’d start thinking about when a certain person might come and play on a certain song.  And we’d even play with that in mind, I guess.

The press release bills Beware as your biggest and most ambitious work to date, which is a nice angle for us in the press.

It’s supposed to say ambidextrous. 

[laughs]  I’ll correct the record.   But do you agree – does it feel like your most ambitious undertaking?

No.  That was just Barnum-esque hyperbole.

Very nice!  You know, I was reading about Barnum recently and how he wound up worrying about his legacy and wanting to make some kind of deeper cultural impact – thus bringing Jenny Lind over to sing and all that.  I’m surprised Hollywood hasn’t had its hooks in that story.

There was a fairly successful Broadway musical in the early ‘80s.  They took the story and they did make a TV-movie with Burt Lancaster as Barnum.  They took all the songs out, but it’s pretty good.  You can find it on video – it’s pretty interesting.  It definitely covers that part of his life pretty well.

There’s a growing sentiment in the music press that 1) the album is dead and 2) that’s not such a bad thing.  As a songwriter, though, does it feel like an unnatural or confining process?  It’s difficult to imagine many of your albums presented as stand-alone singles or whatever the future supposedly holds.

I definitely like to be making an album – that’s a part of it.  Of course, it’s important to make rules for yourself like that, like you’re not going to think about music in terms of albums, but you can of course change your mind in three years or six months.  Even using the iPod as a listening device and shuffling, sometimes that can really shine a spotlight on what songs originally were together as an album.  If you listen to ten Thin Lizzy records on shuffle, you can be like, “Oh, that’s that sound!  That’s when the drums sounded like this, that’s when this musician was playing with them.”  You recognize that that’s what an album is – not even necessarily a collection of songs that go together, but a record of that moment in this ensemble’s history and what they sounded like and how they felt about their music and how they felt about each other.  That’s the value, to me, of a record.  It’s a time to go over multiple kinds of songs and to show yourself what’s happening with all these musicians and how good you are at attacking songs.  That value will never go away.  Any time you record two songs as opposed to one, it’s like “Oh, wow” to hear how they’re related to each other in so many ways – not just thematically.

You’ve been the subject of a fair bit of mythologizing – but not just by the press, but by your fans as well.  Do you pay attention to how you’re being perceived or interpreted by the people listening to your music?

I’m not sure that I do – because I don’t really know how.  I don’t.  So I guess I don’t pay attention to it. 

As a fan, growing up and getting into Danzig or whoever it may have been, did you have an interest in the performers when they stepped off the stage?  What does Danzig do at home and what movies does he like? 

I don’t think so.  I don’t think I was ever interested in that kind of thing about somebody. 

When I was quite young, I got into Iron Maiden and it took me a while as a kid to realize…

That they were regular people?

Yeah, or even that they were people.

Yeah, exactly.

I’d never seen videos of them or seen them live or anything like that.

Right.  That’s how it should be, I think.  The music is an abstraction of humans, and that’s what you like.  There’s no reason to think that you would actually like the humans themselves.  [chuckles]

Speaking of seeing people live… I came across a bootleg of you and David Berman [Silver Jews] doing a show in Ireland like ten years ago – and you guys take five or six minutes and just tell jokes.  Can you pull jokes on the spot?  Or was that premeditated?

Well, Matt Sweeney was a part of that as well and he’s a really good joke teller.  I think it was a combination of all of our chemistry up there.  I think we planned the basic format – not necessarily that there would be jokes, but that there would be some spoken stuff going on.  It’s interesting that there’s a bootleg of it.  It was really fun. 

It certainly seemed so.  What was the event?

It was this terrible, terrible festival.  But we had a good time at it.

Who are your go-to people for comedy?

I like Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!  I like Wonder Showzen and Xavier: Renegade Angel.

What’s Xavier?

That was a computer animated series that the Wonder Showzen people did after Wonder Showzen.  It’s really good.  But it’s hard to find – on the internet, you can only find one complete episode and then just little snippets.  The episodes are really…astounding.  And Neil Hamburger.  Morgan Murphy, do you know her?

No, I don’t think so.

She has some really good things on YouTube.  There’s one where she’s making fun of the drama surrounding this one comedian who steals material.

Mencia?

Mencia, yeah.  She has a really, really amazing routine related to that.  Really, really funny. 

The advance of Beware that went out to press had very prominent, recurring dropouts.  Is that a safeguard against album sales being impacted, or is it more about the principle? 

Yeah – and also because it’s so easy now for something to be leaked that it doesn’t even have to be… you know, 20 years ago, if someone was going to bootleg an advanced copy, they had to put a lot of work into it.  Now you could accidentally leave it on your desk and your girlfriend could give it to all her friends and that’s it.  It might not even be malicious or someone trying to make money or whatever.  I feel like we make release dates for a reason.  It gives us time to be ready for it to be out.  Even as a fan, I like waiting for the release date – it’s exciting – rather than have this leaked thing, which is like someone telling you about your surprise party.

What’s your lineup looking like as you hit the road?  Are you going with the quintet?

It will be drums, double bass, guitar, fiddle, voice.  We’ll play like a month over here and then go to Europe for a couple of weeks and then back for a month over here.  On the second month in the States, there might be two or three more people in the band; that’s all going to be on the Eastern part of the United States.

You have a pretty long history with L.A. going back to your early acting days.  Do you still have a homey relationship with it or does it feel foreign to you?

With a city that’s so complex, essentially I’ve come to a different city every time I’ve come here – and it’s almost unrecognizable, not just because of development of the city itself but because of how I enter or where we play or where we stay.  There’s so much – you could probably have a completely different day of stimulus every day of your life if you wanted to in a city like this.  It could resemble 365 different cities a year.  This time is crazy.  We ate on Olvera Street – I’d never seen that before.  We were walking around there, then walking around here – coming into this crazy room [laughs].  This doesn’t feel like any of the Los Angeleses I’ve been in before.

Likewise!  I’ve only recently started spending significant time downtown during the day and it’s like I’ve moved to a different city.

We just went for a little walk and we were looking in these very, very upscale-looking restaurants and seeing them moderately full of happy diners.  I have no clue who those people are.  Or you see that apartment building and you think “Who lives in all these apartments?  Who?”

Yeah, I always wonder when I’m driving – it will be four in the morning and there’s almost always a fair sprinkling of people on the roads.  Are you drunk?  Going to some weird work shift?

Yeah, you look in the car, and half the time it’s someone with a normal level of energy, dressed normally, and it’s four o’clock in the morning. 

The catalog number of the new record is 666 – the Number of the Beast!  Do you have a favorite song about the devil or a favorite depiction of the devil?

I think when I was a kid, I made a mixtape once that had different things on it, and one thing was Tennessee Williams reading from his own work.  On the mixtape, I had the final monologue from The Glass Menagerie, as read by Tennessee Williams.  He says “Blow out your candles, Laura – and so goodbye,” and then there’s a little silence and then I had “Sympathy for the Devil” start.  It was really, really nice.  [laughs]  “Devil in Disguise,” Flying Burrito Brothers.  Danzig and the Misfits.  The Samhain song “He-Who-Can-Not-Be-Named” – that’s a super great one.  He refers to whatever he’s talking about – a devil, a demon – as an “intricate entity.”