In 2006, Will Oldham starred in the small-run, independent film Old Joy. It wasn’t particularly good, at times plodding along uncomfortably without dialogue as the two characters – old friends reuniting for a weekend camping trip – failed to bridge the distance that had grown between them. What was remarkable about the film was how Oldham’s acting seemed to so closely mirror his music. It was off-kilter and jarring, but with understated ease. Oldham’s character carried the same weary mixture of wisdom and innocent wonder mixed with broken-hearted disillusion that he’s evoked under his myriad musical monikers, from Palace Music to Bonnie “Prince” Billy.
Listening to Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s latest album, Lie Down in the Light (Drag City), the grainy natural images collaged into scenes in Old Joy spring to mind. There’s a peacefulness and lure to the songs, but cut against a slightly uneasy longing. Oldham’s songs have often embraced darker contours behind his cracking, haunted voice, and though Lie Down in the Light seems to be a song cycle about death and mortality, it is undoubtedly among Oldham’s brighter and more uplifting efforts. Even as the religious sentiments throughout beckon to be filtered with lighter strains, Oldham’s voice remains, as always, wrought with yearning and his hopefulness sounds as much a plea to see the light as experience basking in it.
“Easy Does It” opens the album with familiar crackling lilt that eventually breaks into a Band-like piano romp with Oldham humming along, though Glen Duncan’s fiddle bows with a bit too much country innocuousness. “You Remind Me of Something (The Glory Goes)” adds Ashley Webber’s vocals in echo to Oldham’s dark folk. The harmonized line “I like the places where the night does not mean an end” seems to capture the aesthetic of the album, dark but inexplicably light. Oldham is like a reaper, seeming to always know more than he divulges, an overpowering understanding of dread and desire that he softens with a comforting glow as he ushers you into mystery.
“For Every Field There’s a Mole” plays calmly like modern folk psalms, braced with a gentle jazz clarinet as Oldham delivers fatalistic visions: “There’s a time to sing these things, and a time to have it sung, a time to bring the tune, and a time to have it brung … and a hand to hold your throat, to stifle that crying choke.” “Other’s Gain” is likewise an instructive missive that sounds like a combination of 1960s folk-pop and biblical declaration.
Webber’s voice on duets “So Everyone” and, especially, “You Want That Picture” quake with power into Oldham’s verses, while “Missing One” and “What’s Missing Is” sow a beautiful longing with soft grace, letters to the departed that neither mourn nor move past the loss. “Where is the Puzzle” and the title track, meanwhile, explore death from the opposite angle, souls on the threshold but not quite gone. Lie Down in the Light ultimately feels like an exegesis on death, on passing and missing, leaving and remaining, and the calm acceptance of it all. And perhaps no artist can weave these themes with so much simultaneous darkness and light as well as Oldham.
This article appears in July 11 • 2008.
