BONNIE PRINCE BILLY - We Are Together Again

A career spanning more than thirty years and over forty albums is an enormous body of work, but for an artist like Will Oldham it's just one long series of notes and reflections that go hand in hand with a life spent constantly searching for stories to tell.

With melodies as simple as they are archaic and mysterious, the American musician has come through unscathed the transition from subversive country singer under the many guises of Palace (Brothers, Songs, Contribution, Music) to cursed noir poet (the unforgettable "I See A Darkness" and "Master And Everyone"), and now, with the fog finally clearing, he has embraced the Nashville country gospel, buoyed by a vocal maturity that was put to the test on the previous album "The Purple Bird".

The return to roots and archaic folk language finds further expression in "We Are Toghether Again", an album recorded in a Louisville studio with trusted producer and sound engineer Jim Marlowe: ten tracks, some of which were cut from the previous "The Purple Bird" for not fitting the context, as fragile and delicate as they are refined.

Alongside his ever-descriptive and poetic lyrics, the musician places melodies that are subdued and raw in tone, only rarely finding the comfort of instrumental solutions with immediate appeal, as on "(Everybody Got A) Friend Named Joe".

The details are the real strength of a record that only on a distracted listen might seem slightly monochrome. Sometimes it's the horns responsible for a subtle shift in rhythm ("Vietnam Sunshine"), more often it's the interplay between the voices that seduces the listener, reconciling sparse instrumental structures with baroque-folk grandiloquence ("Strange Trouble" and "Life In A Scary Horses").

The author of "We Are Toghether Again" is an extremely curious and attentive musician, and the presence among the vocalists of Sally Timms of the Mekons and Catherine Irwin of Freakwater is no accident. Will Oldham's ear has always been attuned to different languages, just look at his list of collaborations (from Trembling Bells to Bitchin Bajas, from Tortoise to Matt Sweeney) to understand it, and it's no surprise that for the sumptuous chamber-folk arrangement of "Hey Little" he cited "Dear Jessie" by Madonna as an inspiration.

The large number of collaborators accompanying Will Oldham on this new album – among others Thomas Deakin, Chris Bush, Erin Hill, Nuala Kennedy, Ned Oldham, Chris Cupp, Jacob Duncan – is a further sign of the care that went into crafting it. Even though these songs add nothing new to what he's already said over a long career, there's so much beauty, melancholy and hope in them that it's impossible not to appreciate them.

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13/03/2026