Will Oldham/Palace/Bonnie Prince Billie: S&D

https://soundcloud.com/temporary-residence-ltd-1/bonnie-stillwatter-the-devil-is-people

Will backed by Britt Walford on drums and Zac from Grails on guitar.

and here is the b-side remix by Bundy K. Brown:
https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/202066152%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-ruIxW&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true

*imagining a 'conceptual collaboration' between Will Oldham, Stephen Stills, & these guys
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5d/Sweetwater_sm.jpg*

finally picked up ease down the road, it is pretty good

i like it way better than master & everyone

i could imagine it being a letdown after darkness but 15 years later when it is just another title among oldham's 20-odd albums it is very good

kind of reminds me of "joya", mid-period oldham that is somewhat minor but still interesting and pleasant

wasn't joya the first lp under the will oldham name? it felt momentous to me (at 16) for that reason and so looms large in my personal palace cosmology. really good record still i think. i need to revisit ease down the road.

I like both Joya and EDTR. They're records that could only have been made by a guy in his thirties. Anyway, that's how I like to think of them.

The s/t album from 2013 is, I think, his strongest work in years.

I went back to Master & Everyone a few weeks back and found it really dull. I always confuse that one with Beware (which iirc is pretty good)

oldham sounds so good on this new joan shelley song: https://soundcloud.com/noquarterrex/stay-on-my-shore-by-joan-shelley

He did a low-key show in Louisville the other night, would have been great to be there.

Ease Down The Road is my favorite. And perfect one to listen to this time of year. Pajo's Allman-y solo on "May It Always Be" followed by the line "And in the morning we'll wrestle and ruin our stomachs with coffee."

The only blight on that record is "Just To See My Holly Home." I always skip that one.

nah. that's one of the better songs on that album imo.

ent back to Master & Everyone a few weeks back and found it really dull. I always confuse that one with Beware (which iirc is pretty good)

― Wimmels, Tuesday, June 30, 2015 11:08 AM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i confuse them too. i have never been able to get into master & everyone, it definitely seems super dull and boring, i don't know maybe it will click for me one day

i love holly home!

M&E is like a balm/relief for a troubled psyche, it's soft, tenuous, warm. there are nice subtleties to mark nevers' production.. he also recorded is a woman by Lambchop, which is remarkably lush and spare.

definitely a lot of beautiful and subtle touches poured onto M&E, but the songs (outside of The Way, which is gorgeous and crushing) never really stuck with me.

been many years since i've listened though. should really revisit.

"maundering" resonates, w/its lyrics, and a lean, ranch fence-styled guitar lead.. a minor highlight of the album. weed helped to synchronize with the general wavelength/vibe of the album.

caught them live, maybe a year or so after master and everyone was released. the songs def had more weight and power, spruced up and rocked out somewhat. it helped to be already familiar with the material as well.. they played at one of the better venues (the zephyr) in salt lake city, before it closed down. I believe ZWAN had also played in town that day, as some of the members were in the audience.

http://www.dominorecordco.com/pondscum/

Saw him last night at the Vic in Chicago. He's got an astoundingly gifted band with him right now. The last song -- a medley of "Jolly One (2/15)" and "New Partner" that included harmonies from Maiden Radio (including Joan Shelley and Cheyenne Mize) -- was just gorgeous.

Having heard him in the early days then sort of checking out for good twelve or fifteen years, I'm blown away at the artist he's turned into. The thing that kind of blows my mind is that he still has a long career ahead of him. Really curious where he'll be creatively in another ten years.

Nice, he's been doing that as a set closer for a while:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_FafCJbyWE

So majestic when he's hood flies off at the end of the song. Surely staged.

Will Oldham can control the weather. Next steps in career: mainstream country success, own line of eyeliner, meteorokinesis.

I've been aware of Oldham since his earliest output, which didn't do much for me back then, and in the ensuing years I've dipped in and out of his vast discography. Some albums are good, some not as good, but for some reason I'm one of those guys for whom "I See a Darkness" is the only Oldham I'll ever play. The guy is certainly gifted, but I sometimes feel like there is a secret language I'm just not understanding, or other people are pretending to understand. Is it me, or is it him?

A sentence I have not heard anyone utter in at least twenty years: "There's a song on the new Bonnie Prince Billy album you've just got to hear." Talented chap but has been coasting / resting on his laurels for a long time.

It was a while ago but I think Superwolf has some must-hears.

I really want that album he did with Bitchin Bajas with the fortune cookie lyrics

josh - i think, at least to me, the 'secret' language you allude to is rather just the 'world' of palace/bonnie itself. will's skew-whiff delivery aside, the appeal for me is how he fluidly embodies his work... the way he just seems to breathe and live everything thats inside him. it can seem cryptic on the surface. really i think its just existential. i feel the same way about jandek, who's existential throughout his catalogue, too. while jandek's a tough listen, sometimes, i can sit and read jandek's lyrics for hours on end. digressing a bit, but... i suppose that's as succinct as i can try to be about will. maybe it sounds like im talking out my arse... im just trying to articulate what you picked up on a bit.

I think the best record he did was the one with Nashville session guys, Sings Greatest Palace Music. I didn't mind Singer's Grave a Sea of Tongues, but whatever. I've always found him just a bit...ahh, ehh. He's got good taste in stuff, for sure.

Ease Down The Road is my pick. Also, his book-long conversation with Alan Licht is pretty good at articulating the choices of persona, arrangements, etc.

fave thing he ever did was that version of Hot Chip's I Feel Better, "I Feel Bonnie"

How does this thread have no mention of the gorgeous, moving, lyrical The Letting Go? Dawn McCarthy brings ellipsoid, inverted harmonies from another dimension, Valgeir Sigurðsson's production and orchestration is sympathetic and minimal, and the songs are understated and absolutely devastating.
Oldham's greatest work bypasses form and makes an unusually direct emotional connection. If you don't feel it, you don't, but I do.
Seek: Days in the Wake, Hope EP, Viva Last Blues, Arise, Therefore, Black/Rich Music, Lost Blues, I See a Darkness, Little Lost Blues, The Letting Go
Destroy Sings Greatest Palace Music (sorry, I know many like it) - apart from TLG he kind of lost me after that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsddBLr6pFc

yeah there are tons of great songs in his stuff from the last decade... he just releases a lot of stuff, which i think minimizes the market/word-of-mouth impact of any one album or song.

I was completely obsessed during my college years. Yeah, as beautifully articulated above, it's less catchy jams and more about a lilting, dark/light mystic world that he conjures and inhabits. I think he's a brilliant lyricist and persona.

This is his most underappreciated song in recent years that I've heard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIv-pD6R7VI

I love this all-time classic post (well okay, actually two posts)

i went to a fair in a small and quaint english town once & all the villagers were wearing costumes & among them walked bonnie prince billy

― schlump, Saturday, 15 November 2014 06:51 (1 year ago) Permalink

i have a picture somewhere

it was nice because there was a moment when we pointed across the harbour while we were eating at a man with a big beard wearing all denim, & said that he looked like bonnie prince billy, this amusing because bonnie prince billy's look is that of the strange man of the village, probably at least approximately replicated in most small and quaint villages

but it was bonnie prince billy

― schlump, Saturday, 15 November 2014 06:53 (1 year ago) Permalink

I'm far from a BPB completist, but I feel comfortable saying that the best thing he's done in recent years = helping to launch Angel Olsen's career. The Now Here's My Plan EP of reworked old material is also a highlight... I seem to recall the 2013 s/t LP being nice though I haven't listened to it since it first came out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSO2SqwI-cI <<< this is hawt

A like a lot, or at least some, of what many of you have mentioned - I want to say I've enjoyed The Letting Go and more recently Beware and Lie Down Into the Light, though not Plays Greatest - but like I said, "Darkness" is the only one I honestly ever go back to. It could be that at least from my perspective, even if his other stuff is good, that album is just better? I dunno. Like I mentioned, I've been at least casually following him since, I dunno, 1993 or so? That's when I moved to Chicago, and that's when a lot of friends of mine were really into Palace. But Palace never did it for me then, and every several years I try again and it has yet to click. I don't find it objectively "bad," I just can't put my finger on what's pushing me away. (I'm also not a fan of Slint, so who knows.)

I think the persona thing may be what keeps me a few arms lengths away. I mean, Dylan has a persona, too, but I've never had much of an emotional connection to his music, even the stuff I like best, yet that's never been a problem; I find him best at his funniest, not his most heartbreaking. But BPB, I've had people say "you have to listen to such and such song/album, it will just reduce you to tears!" Yet while I can hear, academically, what he's after, perhaps it's the persona stuff that keeps me from embracing it, or getting out of it what he wants me to.

That said, like Dylan, I think Oldham can be really funny, too, but maybe it's just funny in all the wrong places and that throws me off.

i like this guy most on side-projects it seems. that Bitchin Bajas thing (weiiird meditative noodling) and Superwolf are highly recommended!

lie down in the light & beware are both great

His most recent 'proper' album, Singer's Grave - A Sea of Tongues, is really very good.

i adore all the palace stuff, ISAD, joya, all BPB up to ease down the road, after that i find him really boring and spotty but there is a lot i haven't listened to. master and everyone, beware, etc are snoozefests, though lie down in the light has a few songs i really enjoy. i still ahven't heard greatest palace music! i bet i would like it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V0NbUYb9BY

My friend Caroline Peyton sings on Singer's Grave, she'd worked w/ Mark Nevers previously and Will thought her voice would be perfect for "Quail and DUMPLINGS!."

Interesting early band history c/o Drag City:

http://www.dragcity.com/news/2018-04-01-stream-palace-1993

STREAM PALACE 1993
posted April 1st, 2018

OHIO RIVER BOAT SONG

It was the summer of 1992 and Todd Brashear invited his friend Will Oldham to come live with him in Bloomington, Indiana where Brashear was in the Audio Engineering program at IU. Oldham moved into a house with Brashear and his schoolmate Grant Barger, and soon they began working on music all together. They set up a weekend session at the house with Barger at the controls, using his 8-track cassette recording machine (not to be confused with the crappy 8-track tape format popularized in the 1970s). They invited David Pajo to come up from Louisville to play on the session. There were three songs to tackle: “For the Mekons et al”, “Two More Days”, and “Drinking Woman”. Brashear played drums and lap steel and sang harmonies, Barger played bass and Pajo played lead guitars (both acoustic and electric). Oldham sang and played acoustic guitar. The house was an older house with high ceilings and wood floors, and Barger’s engineering was impeccable so that everything sounded good and felt in line with an aesthetic that felt like a true realization of what was in Oldham’s mind.

Around the same time, Brashear and Oldham scheduled a session in the IU studios, with Brashear as engineer. Britt Walford and Brian McMahan came up from Louisville and, there in the fancy studio using 16-track 2” magnetic tape, the group recorded “Ohio River Boat Song” and “Riding”, with McMahan playing drums, Brashear playing bass and Walford playing electric guitar. This sound was big and clean and the songs had a polish to them that differed significantly from the house recording with Barger. Beautiful, though maybe not quite the kind of recordings Oldham was beginning to want to be a part of. The Barger session was all about assembling people and getting the takes right together as an ensemble, while the Brashear session was more about studio craft. One could listen to “Drinking Woman” and hear the musicians clearly, almost imagine one is in the room as the song happens. “Ohio River Boat Song” has more of an out-of-time-and-place vibe happening. Brashear and Barger were both great engineers, and the methods and technology used for the two sessions differed significantly.

Oldham sent cassettes to a few record labels featuring a proposed 7” single: “For the Mekons, et al” backed with “Drinking Woman”. A perfect single! Of the four labels Oldham sent tapes to (including Matador, Homestead, and Interscope), only Drag City responded enthusiastically. He’d sent Drag City the tape because he had a copy of the Silver Jews“Dime Map of the Reef” EP and sensed a value-system in play that might accept some of what was being dished out. Drag City said they were intrigued but needed to hear more. Oldham sent them “Ohio River Boat Song” and Drag City was sold; they liked the solid power of that recording. They asked if they could match this latter song with a song from the earlier cassette for release as a single. “Drinking Woman” was a born B-side. The Mekons ode would have to wait for a more opportune moment.

The cover of the single was designed by Paul Greenlaw, a great visual and musical artist from Rhode Island. Greenlaw used an archival aerial photograph of some unnamed coastline over which he superimposed lettering fashioned from a photograph Oldham had taken of Mekons violinist Susie Honeyman (when Greenlaw started the design, the idea was still for “For the Mekons et al” to be the A-side). The lettering spelled out “palace songs”. In the lower-right corner of the front cover was a sad yellow bird that Greenlaw had drawn. The back cover featured a Greenlaw elephant, a “Palace Brothers” banner, a fleur-de-lis (symbol of Louisville, KY) and a photo from the “Drinking Woman” session of Oldham, Brashear and Pajo. There’s an alphabetical listing of contributors to the existence of the record, as Oldham was still figuring things out and didn’t know how best to attribute the existence of any fraction of the whole. Only black and yellow inks were used on the sleeve in order to keep costs down. The label design was a throwback to old-school labels: royal blue with metallic silver ink. Dan Osborn is the Drag City graphics admiral and he executed the label design beautifully.

Oldham shot a video for “Ohio River Boat Song” on 16mm black-and-white film using a wind-up Russian camera. The footage centered around the early morning horse exercises at Churchill Downs in the spring. Osborn and Oldham edited the footage at Osborn’s office in the HARPO compound.

“For the Mekons et al” came out later on the compilation Hey Drag City. “Two More Days” came out on a compilation called Love Is My Only Crime, released in Europe. “Riding” was re-arranged and re-recorded for the record There is No-One What Will Take Care of You. The recording of “Riding” from the Bloomington session was included on Lost Blues and Other Songs.

The "Ohio River Boat Song" single is streaming everywhere now.

THERE IS NO-ONE WHAT WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU

Once the “Ohio River Boat Song” single went into production, Drag City asked the Palace Brothers for a full-length record. Over the summer in Bloomington, Oldham had been writing songs and was thrilled to find that these songs might have a welcome place in the world, at least when it came to there being a label willing to release them. At the end of summer, Oldham moved back to Providence, Rhode Island, where he was ambivalently pursing a college degree in semiotics. He went to ethnomusicology professor Jeff Titon and suggested an independent study class, supervised by Titon, in which Oldham would work on a set of songs derived in many ways from a variety of historical styles, forms and sources. Oldham worked on many of the songs with musicians Matt Fanuele, Paul Greenlaw, John Davis, Mark Cummins, and Colin Gagon. Davis introduced Oldham to the records of the Royal Trux, and at one point during the fall the Trux came through Providence on tour. The band stayed over at the house Oldham shared with writer Bob Arellano. For Oldham, it was the first in-person encounter with the inner world of Drag City; not just Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty, but also drummer Rian Murphy, the third leg of the power tripod (with Dan Osborn and Dan Koretzky) that has defined the character and mission of Drag City over the years.

Oldham and Brashear scheduled the recording session for December of 1992 in Kentucky. Grant Barger would engineer, using his 8-track cassette rig. There were two recording locations: a house on Ohio Street (which street has since lost its name to the larger Frankfort Avenue, of which it is effectively an extension) owned by Steve Driesler (who has, in more recent years, re-entered the Drag City galaxy through his work on the White Glove Test book of Louisville music fliers and his involvement with the Endtables reissue record) and a cabin outside of Brandenburg, KY, called “Merciful”. Brian McMahan and Britt Walford would play on the record, along with Barger, Brashear, Oldham and Paul Greenlaw. Brashear, Barger, McMahan and Walford traded off instruments (inspired, in part, by the Bad Seeds records of the 1980s), while Oldham stuck to singing and playing the guitar and Greenlaw played the banjo. Greenlaw was a deeply inspired and unique banjoist; it was the sound of Greenlaw, as opposed to the sound of a banjo, that made Greenlaw’s presence crucial.

The record was mixed by Brashear, Barger, and Oldham at Brashear’s parents house in east Louisville.

There were fifteen songs considered for the recording. A cover of the Rolling Stones “Hand of Fate” was dropped at the last minute. The full-length record ended up with twelve songs. The outtakes were “Don’t I Look Good Today”, which came out on a double 7” comp called Louisville Sluggers 3, released on Mike Bacayu’s Self Destruct label; and “Valentine’s Day”, which came out eventually on the Palace Music comp Lost Blues and Other Songs. The rest of the songs were new originals Oldham began during the previous summer in Bloomington, except “Riding”, which was begun a year or two earlier, and a cover of Washington Phillips’ “I Had a Good Mother and Father”.

Auspiciously, David Berman and Bob Nastanovitch of the Silver Jews passed through Louisville and stopped by the session at Driesler’s house. It had been the Silver Jews 7” Ep that had inspired Oldham to send the first Palace Brothers recordings to Drag City.

Greenlaw painted and/or the covers for There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You. Oldham had asked him to render the fable of the mouse and the lion and requested that Greenlaw use bright pink and yellow. Greenlaw worked on the cover intensely, ultimately coming up with four powerful variations. Ultimately, all four were utilized, each for a different format or pressing. The back cover is a black and white photograph of a road in northern Scotland taken by Oldham during a hitch-hiking trip.

The record was licensed, via a connection made by Nastanovitch, to the British label Big Cat. The relationship with Big Cat lasted only for the one release, after which all Palace and Bonnie Prince Billy records were licensed through Domino.

There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You is streaming everywhere now.

COME IN

It was 1993 and the musical ideas were flowing. Oldham wrote two songs for a 7”, “Trudy Dies” and “Come In”. There was a live-to-DAT session done in Louisville and/or Chicago that was deemed unsuccessful. Meanwhile, Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux were establishing themselves as freelance record producers under the noms-de-guerre Adam & Eve, and it was decided that they should guide the recording of these two songs. The studio was King Size, in Chicago, run by Dave Trumfio. Mike Fellows tracked the drums but Hagerty erased those drum tracks and replayed the kit himself. Liam Hayes played the Mellotron. Adam & Eve expressed a desire to bring out the inner Springsteen in Oldham’s songs. The front cover of the record sleeve featured a drawing by Jeff Mueller of a bird embryo. The back cover held a photograph by Oldham of land outside of Madison, Virginia. Lyrics to “Trudy Dies” were included on an insert with drawings by Dianne Bellino. There was a video made for “Come In” featuring animation by Bellino and 16mm footage of music rehearsals in the basement of David Pajo’s parents’ house.

The "Come In" single is streaming everywhere now.

Artists in this story: Palace Music

The letting go remains my favourite to this day

i am not reading that whole thing but THERE IS NO-ONE WHAT WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU is one of my favorite titles of anything ever