Bonnie “Prince” Billy | I Made a Place | (Drag City)
Videos by American Songwriter
Four out of Five Stars
“You need to knock this one out of the park…”
Will Oldham sings in his signature warbly croon on “New Memory Box,” the
opening song on his newest LP — ‘I Made A Place’. Oldham joins fellow Drag City
luminaries Bill Callahan and the late David Berman in making his long awaited
comeback in 2019. I Made A Place is his first LP of new originals since 2011’s ‘Wolfroy
Goes To Town’ and with time comes expectation.
The track titles were revealed by Oldham on
Drag City’s instagram accompanied by grotesque pictures of mutilated frogs and
snails Oldham had compiled, much to the dismay of Drag’s unsuspecting
followers. “When I have a problem / I know just what to do: / I go to bed and
dream a while / something will come through,” Oldham writes under a picture of
flattened, dried up toad.
Morbid as he may be, ‘I Made A Place’ is overall a less melancholy affair than
Bonnie at his most Billy. Throughout the album the mood often shift between
somber and joyous, sometimes within the same song. “The record is broken into
sides, with the first side big and happy and dense and the second side open and
questioning and happily sad,” Oldham writes in the press release.
Sonically the album is a bit more consistent,
making great use of Jacob Duncan’s lush wind and horn arrangements. With these
songs, Oldham manages to subtly innovate while still showcasing his seemingly
bottomless well of western and country music influences.
One of the album’s highlights is the beautiful, stripped-down “Look Backward On
Your Future Look Forward To Your Past,” a Prine-esque, tongue-in-cheek, acoustic
tune about fate and acceptance, partially inspired by a picture of Oldham’s
mother as a child. “This particular assemblage of molecules and memories
someday soon may just run out of gas / so look backward to your future and look
forward to your past.”
But the album’s crown jewel is the staggeringly beautiful “The Glow Part. 3,” a
sequel to a series of songs by fellow songwriter Phil Elverum of The
Microphones. “How worried are you when you don’t see the glow? / When it’s
stuffed deep and awfully in a junk drawer below.” Duncan’s excellent wind
arrangements are at their most radiant and whimsical here, and Oldham and
backup singer Joan Shelley deliver some of their strongest harmonies: “Fill me
up / pour me another / I can still see the light of day.”
‘I Made A Place’ is a definitive home run, a contemplative and gorgeous
meditation on life, sadness and Western civilization.
It is tough to immediately decide where this record fits into Oldham’s dense, diverse and frankly daunting discography, but it’s reaffirming to see him still swinging for the fences.
