down home

The cover artwork of the new Bonnie “Prince” Billy album Beware looks a fair bit like one of my favorite albums, Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night (1975). Not that it matters much to the discussion here, but I just wanted to get that out of the way early. (Beware doesn’t sound anything like the boozy self laceration of the raw and raucous Tonight’s the Night anyway.)

Now Will Oldham has always been prolific, keeping himself busy by releasing a string of consistently good records over the past twenty years or so. Other than the more ornate atmospherics of his 2006 album The Letting Go (recorded in Iceland, strings arranged by Nico Muhly) and the indie rock tie-up with Matt Sweeney on Superwolf (2005), he has rarely strayed far from his country-rock roots. A warm fog of laidback lightness comes over both last year’s Lie Down in the Light and now Beware, as if Oldham has set up to engage his audience more confidently than before to impart some life lessons. Pain and troubled waters are of course inevitable, these songs seem to say, but we muddle through.

When Oldham sings “I take this load on, it is my life’s work/ To bring you into the light from out of the dark”, the redemptive quality of his voice seems to command something more universal than one man’s devotion to his missus. Such layers of earthiness and Oldham’s unseasonable calm frame Beware in many domestic ways, and that feeling of friendly kinship is reinforced by the roster of likeminded collaborators that he has gathered.

Poignant song reflections like “I Won’t Ask Again” and “Heart’s Arms” are illuminated by the songwriter’s stoical intuitions, perhaps even connecting us depleted souls to Oldham’s restless dreams and visions. And when he sings “There’s a body made just for me, lying somewhere curled lonely” on the beautifully rendered “I Don’t Belong To Anyone”, it leaves the door ajar for an assuring bedroom romp. It’s again one of Will Oldham’s most cherished talents, I suppose, his ability to write songs convincingly about warm-bodied beneficiaries of lust.