death and the Purple bird
Death was already a preoccupation for Will Oldham when he released his first album under the Bonnie “Prince” Billy moniker, 1999’s I See a Darkness. That elegiac, palliative record offered a wisdom beyond Oldham’s years, attracting the attention of no less an authority on grief than Johnny Cash, who covered the title track on American III: A Solitary Man.
The Purple Bird, released a few weeks after Oldham’s 55th birthday this January, is as thanatopic as ever. But in lieu of I See A Darkness’ austere transcendental style, Oldham has partnered with longtime collaborator (and American Recordings engineer) David “Fergie” Ferguson to swaddle his anxieties in the warmth of the Nashville sound, producing a death-haunted record whose grim reaper bears an uncanny resemblance to Chet Atkins.
Bona fide country fans might detect seams in Oldham’s pastiche that a humble dilettante like me would miss. Outside of a few stylistic detours, though—the Fairport Convention reverie “Sometimes It’s Hard to Breathe” and the brutally bitter polka “Guns Are For Cowards” come to mind—The Purple Bird is a winning, witty synthesis of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s customary elegiac folk and classic country, carried by Ferguson’s production and some of Oldham’s most lissome vocal performances to date.
“The Purple Bird is a winning, witty synthesis of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s customary elegiac folk and classic country, carried by Ferguson’s production and some of Oldham’s most lissome vocal performances to date.”
Instead of coming off as a corncobby affectation, the occasional friction between Oldham’s persistent melancholy and the haze of pedal steel guitar, mandolins, and fiddles just underscores The Purple Bird’s abundant internal contradictions. This is a record that opens with a paean to the virtues of going along to get along in hard times (“Tempted by the lure of a liar / Who preys upon the foolish and the weak / If we rely on love to lift us higher / Things'll be all right for you and me”), only to immediately undercut it with the declaration that “Love overcomes nothing, despite one’s needs.”
The Purple Bird is ambivalent, but not unfocused. Its unifying element is water, and the record’s outlook swells and recedes with the emotional tide. For every goof-around like “Tonight With the Dogs I’m Sleeping,” there’s a recognition of the grim political reality facing us: “Truth forever on the scaffold / Wrong forever on the throne / Hope forever as false promise / Faith forever stands alone.” The appeal of the ocean is, at least in part, the potential for serene oblivion, the dissolution of the ego. “It's the water / That can wash your whole life away,” sings Oldham, who declared 20 years ago that “My home is the sea.”
It’s not hard to diagnose what’s wrong with this country, this world, this decaying era; the problem is knowing what to do with that understanding, to say nothing of the guilty knowledge that the price of your first-world comfort is someone else’s misery. “We live in the ruins of another life's dream,” goes the chorus of “Downstream,” a lovely duet with John Anderson that echoes Wendell Berry’s communitarian update of the golden rule: “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
After a record haunted by familiar specters—“Death looks in the window, as only death must”—the concluding “Our Home,” a cheery ode to simplicity, neighborliness, and self-sufficiency, can’t help but ring a little hollow. A tactical retreat, not a triumph.
Whether it’s fine or not, the water’s still rising.
By Walt Lewellyn
Walt Lewellyn is a writer in Birmingham, Alabama. He hosts The Black Casebook, the world’s only Batman podcast.
