The Collapse Board Interview: Will Oldham (Bonnie “Prince” Billy)
Bonnie “Prince” Billy is the musical alias of American singer-songwriter Will Oldham, known for his haunting voice and deeply emotional songwriting. Blending folk, country, and indie influences, his music often explores themes of love, loss, and vulnerability with raw, unvarnished honesty. The Purple Bird, Oldham’s thirtieth studio album, was released on January 31, 2025. Made in Nashville with producer David “Ferg” Ferguson and an ensemble of A-list session musicians, it has been described as “a proper Nashville record”.
We caught up with Oldham via Zoom in early April to discuss the making of The Purple Bird, the responsibilities of an artist to their audience, and the rationale for using the Bonnie “Prince” Billy moniker.
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I watched your ‘What’s In My Bag’ video that you did for Amoeba Records a couple of days ago and I was interested that you said you “represented” Bonnie “Prince” Billy and you used the ”We” word, as in “We did this, we did that.” What do you see Bonnie “Prince” Billy as being, if you’re a representative of it?
I think I see other people who have a public life as some sort of expressive artist, whether it’s an actor or a visual artist or a singer, sometimes get tied up in identity to the detriment of not only the work, but maybe even that individual’s mental and emotional health. So it just seemed like there needed to be a certain point where I needed to be able to agree with the audience about if they said “That Bonnie “Prince” Billy show sucked and I hate Bonnie “”Prince” Billy”, I needed to be able to understand what they’re talking about and not feel personally affronted, I guess, on some levels.
And then as well, it just gives me more freedom, when I’m singing a song that employs first person pronouns, to become fully engaged and invested in the song without feeling like I’m necessarily taking leave of my earthly being and the person who is a father and a husband and a son and a friend, et cetera. That person isn’t being thrown to the lions on any given performance stage.
An individual can be measured in those environments and yet that is not the individual and so I think with having Bonnie “Prince” Billy, there’s a shared understanding that it’s an entity for expression, creative expression through music. That gives me license, to not necessarily phone it in, but sometimes I can go deep and still feel like I can get out, if that makes sense, or I can, just embrace it as a harmony singer, even sometimes.
I read you were embarrassed for a long time to call yourself an artist because you didn’t see it as something that was real. What did you mean by that?
I think part of it is maybe being American because we’ve never had strong institutional support for individual level artists, really. In my household, my mother was an artist, and a fully practicing artist, but she never showed her work or talked about her work outside of the house, but that’s what she did. And so I think that probably infected me somewhat and made me think like, “Well, that’s not what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to find a real job,” not understanding, that an artist is a real job. I think part of my drive, for the first 20, 25 years of making music, and still to some extent, was to figure out how I could define for myself the reality of my profession so that I understood it.
There are also a lot of people who embrace the role of artists as a license to sort of fuck up and fuck off. You know, they think like, “Well, this is me and this is my art,” and it’s like that doesn’t mean you don’t have a responsibility to yourself, to society, to other people within the bounds of your work, but it does seem like there are a lot of people who once they, especially once they, get a little recognition and success, that they feel like, “Well, now it’s just about me.” And I take great issue with that. I think it’s definitely it’s an American trend, if it’s not a global trend and I think it’s not a global trend. In Northern India, there are artists communities set up by the government for folkloric artists of a variety of disciplines to live and work. We don’t have anything like that here.
I read the Stereogum interview that you recently did and you were talking about Joanna Newsom and about the appreciation of the audience, so you obviously see that an artist has an obligation to an audience.
I see that, yes.
And that unwritten contract between an artist and their audience isn’t just for the latest record or the latest tour, it extends longer, it’s a bigger commitment?
Yeah, I feel that. For me the ideal situation is that a human being can find their way into something that resembles what we might optimistically label a “Calling” and that they, that person, might then for the rest of their life pursue all aspects of that, thereby sort of being “I want to be useful and I feel like I can be useful by knowing what it is I’m doing and what it is I’m about.” That can come with “Where do I take my breath,” in order to not divide the line at a crucial moment in a song, and it can also come with “How do I comport myself in a promotional interview with a writer, a journalist.
Of course, it’s impossible for all of us to be aware of all of the ways that we are interconnected with other people, so I don’t always know, “Are the people who distribute Bonnie “Prince” Billy records good people?” I don’t know. But if I were to meet them and find out they were bad people, would I say, “Ah, that’s just the breaks”? No, I would probably say, “We need to get the records out of that distributor’s hands and put them into the hands of another distributor.”
I assume that booking agents and promoters are being fair when they’re pricing the tickets on the shows. I’m aware that in the United States especially, these big corporate ticket selling conglomerates like Ticketmaster are not behaving well and so it’s my responsibility to say that my booking agent that I understand that we may enter a city where we have to deal with Ticketmaster every once in a while, but we need to be sure that we’re leaning into shows that are promoted by promoters who do not feel compelled to work with Ticketmaster on their shows. And if I can’t do that, I shouldn’t be doing this as a job.
When you talk about that “Calling”, as an example, if someone produces a body of work and then they decide, “That’s it,” for whatever reason, you think that it needs to be more than that, that’s too transient, that it’s not a true lifetime calling.
It depends because it could be a part of doing the work. My daughter, who’s six, I found a used bookstore in California a month or so ago, a Calvin and Hobbes collection of comic strips, and for the last few weeks, that’s what she wants to hear as a bedtime story, Calvin and Hobbes. It’s reawakening memories of my experiences as a kid, growing up during the heyday of Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin and Hobbes lasted for 10 years and then Bill Watterson, who was the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, ended it. It was over, that’s it.
I take personal offense at people like Steve Martin or Jim Carey, or even Bruce Springsteen or someone like that, who build their body of work on a certain kind of work and a certain approach to work, hit a certain level of popularity, and then they never do any of what you love them for again, never. And they’re like, “Well, now I want to do this,” and they’re only able to do it because they caught everybody’s attention. That upsets me. If Steve Martin wants to be a bad actor in mediocre movies on a small scale because he gets his jollies, it’s just like, “Who the fuck are you and why did I listen to your comedy records religiously? And now it’s so hard for you to even be funny and you built like your career on these?” Or Bruce Springsteen, like making ambitious creative choices and uniquely strange melodramatic evolutions and mutations of what we call rock and roll, and then when it gets to a certain level, it’s just like, “I just need a big keyboard and a lot of reverb and some stupid rhymes.” You know, The Rising, it’s just like, “What the fuck is The Rising? Go home. You need more money?” Did you just all of a sudden think, “I made relatively challenging pop music for a while. I’ve had enough of that. I’m going to just make easy, easy, easy pap for the rest of my life.” That’s kind of annoying.
Jonathan Richman is a is a mason, he builds brick ovens and patios, and things like that. Sometimes with a calling, you can hit a ceiling, you can hit certain boundaries that no matter what you do, you think, “Well, I can’t go any further with this thing, so I need to do something else.” I have a friend who ran the local fantastic independent video store for years and you can’t make a living at the video store now, so you have to find something else to do.
I kind of get where you’re coming from although I would argue that The Rising is probably Springsteen’s last very good album [Note: at least as far as the E-Street Band-affiliated albums go. I am very partial to Devils & Dust and Western Stars]. I think it had a purpose. But I miss his lyric writing from the early days. I don’t know if you listen to them but I think U2 are one of the worst culprits for your argument, they really lost their way and just infuriate me these days.
Yeah, I mean for me, with U2, I had a begrudging affection for some of the records and then, for me, it was the Achtung Baby record. I was just like, “Okay, now, by your own admission, you’re describing the process of doing it.” It’s just like, “We’re rich and powerful people standing in a room trying to come up with something.” If that’s motivation, please, I don’t want to listen to you. If you’re not going in there, because you have something to say, rather than like, “What are we going to say with our next record?” you should volunteer to step down so nobody else has to listen to you, and leave the airwaves open for people who are desperately trying to communicate things to people who are desperately needing to be communicated to.
We talked about you being embarrassed about calling yourself an artist but for your new album, The Purple Bird, you’re recording in Nashville with A-list session musicians, and you’re the big headline name. How does that feel for you, was it a daunting experience?
I’d had a very, very similar experience in many ways in terms of the things that should be, could be, would be daunting about this twenty years ago. I’d made the record Master and Everyone with Mark Nevers in Nashville, at David Bergman’s recommendation, and in the course of that, I learned what a Nashville session musician was, because Mark would say, “Oh, you want a woman to sing? My friend is the head of the singer’s union, what kind of voice are you looking for?” And I said, “Somewhere between Dolly Parton and Sandy Denny.” And so he picks up the phone, calls the head of the singer’s union, says, “I need these tones, this kind of phrasing,” gives us a list of names and phone numbers, we call one, she comes over and sings and blows the top of my skull off, and my world is forever changed. And Mark could see that, and he said, “If you like that, we can make a whole record just like that.” So about a year later, he assembled an A-list team of session musicians, and we made Bonnie “Prince” Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music. That team of musicians included Stuart Duncan on fiddle and mandolin, and he’s also on this record, twenty years later.
I’m not sure when I’ve been in the room of people who are that good at what they do. And that went so far. How good they are meant that they lifted me and made me better. I was a better singer in that session with them twenty years ago, and so having witnessed that, I knew that the expectation wasn’t foreign. It’s daunting, but their job is to accommodate, especially singers. Their job is to accommodate singers, and singers can be a complicated bunch, especially when it comes to doing their work. I imagine singers in Nashville are in pop, country music, and I’m sure there are all different kinds of emotional issues and ego issues, and their job is to be sure that the record gets done in the time allotted, with the budget allowed, and make it great.
I almost felt like Kurt Russell in an old Disney movie, who’d been injected with something that made him super smart or super strong. When I’m in there, I am singing as if I am the singer of my dreams that I always wanted to be, but it’s really me. I’m really here, and I’m not doing overdubs, I’m not doing retakes, I’m right here with these musicians, and I’m singing like this. I know a lot of it is because I’ve worked so long and hard on what I do, but most of it is specific to that environment, that record, and that these musicians, part of this skill set that makes them who they are, is to be able to draw that out and inspire confidence and creativity in the singers that they work with.
The first song on the album is ‘Turn to Dust’ and I’m sure you’re getting a lot of questions about it. I saw a recent interview where you talked about people of different ages and experiences sitting there making music and having a good time, but given the last couple of months, is that becoming more difficult?
There’s certain voices that I would like to hear more of right now, and one big group that I would like to hear more of right now are people who may have actively participated in voting in the current administration. I feel as if there’s a certain amount of conning that was done and manipulation through how information is disseminated that made people vote the way that people voted. But whatever, people voted the way they voted.
When we were making it, when we wrote the song, me and Ferg and Ronnie Bowman wrote the song, there was no discussion of politics, but I felt all of the sudden like I was doing something agitprop and practical and functional by being a part of a song that identified archetypes and the tension between archetypes, specifically in ways that we’re dealing with again in American society and culture, and it made me feel like I’m finally graduating. And then I thought, “Well, when will the song come out? Before the election, after the election,” and we finally decided after the election. But I’m still thinking like, “Well, this is still a song for everybody,” and being a song for everybody, it has the potential ability to create these little bridges from which one stance might be able to cross over and communicate with somebody who has another stance.
Of course, right now, shit is just hitting the fan left and right and I want to know what people are thinking and feeling, no matter how they voted, especially if they voted for the current administration. I feel like people are being so needing to retreat and be so self-protective that I’m not sure what the power of the song is right now. I was very enthusiastic and optimistic and excited about the potential power of ‘Turn To Dust’ and I feel like the shreds of society we’re being served are so confusing that I’m not sure if there’s a way for somebody to even experience the song with a clear head.
I’ve had ‘Guns are for Cowards’ stuck in my head as an earworm ever since I first listened to the album. Where did the premise of the song come from? It’s so interesting and I can’t work out if I sort of have those same thoughts about “Who would you shoot in the face, who would you shoot in the brain” because it’s something that’s happened as I’ve gotten older or just that there’s more evil and injustice in the world. Is that where the song came from? Was it something you were discussing with people?
With the first verse, the idea is to get people’s guard dropped, to make people feel like, “Oh, we’re all friends here. We can talk about these kinds of things.” And then with the second verse and the third verse say, “That’s not something to be thought,” because in the United States, and in Louisville, Kentucky, gun violence is such a real and terrible constant.
I don’t know if it’s being underreported, but potentially one of the greatest advantages of the chaos that American society is in right now is that it doesn’t seem like any idiotic gun happy people are out shooting in the way they were, say, this time last year. Maybe there’s just not room in the newspapers to report on it. Here in Louisville, I think at the time of working on the song, fortunately, it hasn’t gotten closer, but at that time, over the course of a couple of weeks, there were three different times I was supposed to meet with three different people, and each of those meetings, those interactions, was postponed due to separate incidents of gun violence, and I’m just thinking, “This is batshit,” and two of those were involving minors being killed.
I’m not a self-righteous person, I don’t think, but I’m somebody who’s a little bit baffled that if someone has some spare time on their hand, they wouldn’t maybe just attempt to do some minor activity related to gun control or diminishing gun violence or dealing with gun violence, as opposed to, say, binge watching some bullshit streaming show on a streaming service,. The default is like, “Which show haven’t I binge watched yet?” What 18 hours of my life haven’t I given over to somebody who could care less about anything I will ever do in my entire life? Or do something for twenty minutes that would potentially alter or impact the life of one of your fellow human beings? That just blows my mind. It blows my mind. It just seems like when your life flashes before your eyes, do you want most of that to have been sitting on a couch, eating popcorn or and drinking Diet Coke? I don’t know.
My favourite song on the album is London May. You know, I love the harmonies and the uplifting chorus, and looking at the lyrics the first word of each line spells out, “London May”. How did that song come about?
Do you know who London May is?
No.
Oh, so London May, I first met him in like 1985, I think. He was the drummer at the time for Glenn Danzig’s band Samhain, which was the band between the Misfits and Danzig.
Oh, Misfits and Danzig are some of those bands I know of but have never knowingly listened to.
My friends were in a band called Maurice, here in town, and they were, we were all big, huge Samhain and Misfits fans. One of them reached out to Glenn and created a correspondence through the mail and then when they were doing a Samhain tour, Glenn asked Maurice to open a week of shows throughout the Midwest, and I got invited along by my friends to take pictures, basically, because that’s what I was doing at the time, taking pictures of musicians. They were a bunch of rowdy New Jersey guys, the Samhain group, including Glenn, but London was a sweet guy from Baltimore and we became friends and we’ve stayed friends since then.
He then became a career nurse and he’s a nurse at a children’s hospital in Los Angeles, while still playing music sometimes. His fantasy was to make movies, produce movies, make movies, be in, act in movies, and he made a low budget, kind of classic B-horror movie called Night of the Bastard, in which there’s a scene where his character is about to be besieged by a cult of Satan worshippers out in the desert, and so he’s sort of battening down the hatches and making his house secure to resist the attack. At the beginning of that montage sequence, the character puts a needle on a record, and London called and was like, “Could I use one of your songs?” and I was like, “How about if I make up a new song for this movie?” and he said, “Okay.”
So I made up the song for Night of the Bastard and it’s in there, a version of it. This record was all set up and we had seven or eight songs and I wanted to revisit that song because I didn’t feel like we’d done it justice. So we brought it in there.
There’s so many cool things. We just performed with London May in Los Angeles a few weeks ago and he played drums on ‘London May’, which is pretty cool. But I forgot, I completely forgot that after he worked for Glenn Danzig, he got a job for John Prine, working for John Prine’s Oh Boy record label and the only time I ever saw Johnny Cash live was the first time I saw John Prine live, Prine opening for Cash in New York City at London’s Invitation in 1989. And then it’s funny that my first Prine listening was all cassettes that London sent me from the catalog. Ferg, who produced this record and co-wrote all the songs, when I first met Ferg, he co-owned a studio called The Butcher Shop with Prine, and I met Prine numerous times through Ferg, as well as Prine’s son, Tommy Prine, co-wrote one of the songs on the record, and of course, Ferg’s, was Johnny Cash’s right-hand man for a number of years as well. So it was funny that London was this bizarre thread through line. Then, of course, Danzig wrote a song for the first American recordings record for Johnny Cash to sing, ‘Thirteen’.
That song, I’m sure a lot of the magic comes from Mike Rojas’s insane keys and Fred Eltringham’s insane drums and Brit Taylor’s incredible vocal harmonies and all this stuff, but I love it, and when people love it, I can’t help but think it’s because it has this history. It’s what a song should be, which is not an entity unto itself, but an entity that is also a representation of relationships and history, musical and non-musical, and that’s what it is. I’m pretending that that’s what comes through and gives the song its strength. Whether or not that’s the truth, I don’t know.
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The Purple Bird is out now on No Quarter Records – https://bonnieprincebilly.bandcamp.com/album/the-purple-bird
