BONNIE PRINCE BILLY - The Purple Bird

A simple grammar for difficult lives: that could be one way to sum up the essence of country music. That is, how to tell, in a language built to speak to everyone, that living and dying are terribly complicated things.

Will Oldham knows this perfectly well, having conversed with his rural soul throughout his entire career, especially in the guise of Bonnie "Prince" Billy. This time, though, there's something more. Because "The Purple Bird" presents itself as a genuine relocation to the heart of Nashville, with the help of one decisive name: David Ferguson.

More than just a producer, Ferguson is something of an institution in Nashville, a veteran of the mixing desk who has worked with the likes of Johnny Cash, John Prine, Sturgill Simpson... And it was back in the days of the Man in Black's "American Recordings" that he and Oldham first met. Since then, the two have forged a prickly, visceral friendship, one capable of convincing Oldham to let his guard down as rarely before. The result is one of the most compelling works in his vast discography.

"If you're asking my opinion/ I'm just an ordinary man". Usually, on a track like the opener "Turned To Dust (Rolling On)", Oldham would have sought the most oblique path to get to the point. Here, instead, he lets himself be carried away by the warmth of the piano and the Hammond organ, unhesitatingly embracing the clarity of the melody. "Right is right, wrong is wrong/ No matter what side you're standing on", he sings, untangling with disarming wisdom the knot of our universal state of war.

"Just sing, that's all", was Ferguson's advice, "everyone else will follow you". And so Oldham managed to find the key to a kind of surrender that was new to him, despite all the collaborations that have dotted his career: "When I heard my voice back, I took a step back and said to myself: oh, this is a person I had never met before...".

Then again, "The Purple Bird" isn't just the result of recording alongside the "best band available in Nashville", as Ferguson proudly proclaims. It's also the fruit of genuine "songwriting sessions" in which the Tennessee producer involved Oldham: an exercise in collective writing alongside songwriters like Pat McLaughlin, Ronnie Bowman and John Anderson (who duets with Oldham on "Downstream"), lending an unexpected classicism to the songs credited to Bonnie "Prince" Billy. The classicism of a "pre-digital world", to use his own words, which has little to do with the renewed hype surrounding the country music universe.

It's no surprise, then, that the album's songs blossom into a flourish of fiddle, mandolin and vocal harmonies. The playful honky tonk of “Tonight With The Dogs I’m Sleeping” shines under the glimmer of brass, while the polka of “Guns Are For Cowards” dances arm in arm with the accordion, raising its voice against guns through a chorus with a boozy flavor. Between the bittersweet caress of “Boise, Idaho” and the existential lightness of “The Water’s Fine”, the moments that bear the most recognizable stamp of Bonnie "Prince" Billy turn out, in the end, to also be the shadowiest in tone, from “Sometimes It’s Hard To Breathe” to “London May” (in which the initial letters of the verses spell out the name of the former Samhain drummer and friend to whom the song is dedicated).

Oldham seems to contemplate the alchemy of these songs with a look of wonder, as suggested by the image chosen for the cover (based on a reworking of a childhood drawing by Ferguson), in which the "purple bird" of the title becomes a kind of symbolic figure for the music of Nashville: "I wanted to portray myself in a sort of state of shock, awe and wonder in front of this huge, crazy beast, because that's more or less how I've always felt while making the record."

Over the skeleton of an arpeggio, Oldham's voice transforms the Clark Sisters' "Is My Living In Vain?" — also performed on stage during the recent Italian tour — into a kind of rarefied Appalachian gospel, where the insistence of its questions ("Is my living in vain?/ Is my giving in vain?") is answered by the force of a certainty: “No no, of course not/ It’s not all in vain/ Because up the road is eternal gain”. The challenge is to keep hoping even in the darkness of our times. The challenge is to manage, once again, to build a home, as announced by the festive pace of “Our Home”, a place where one can truly dwell. It's a choral hymn, a grand finale that brings onstage another apostle of country music, Tim O'Brien. Hope is reborn from the simplest things, like the ability to look each other straight in the eye: "Look in the eyes of the people we meet/ That's how we make it our home".

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11/04/2025