Billy the Kidder

BIG WILLY STYLE: ãWhatâs the sexiest thing? A cock (mine) and a pussy (hers),ä says Oldham

Will Oldham is being difficult.

by A.D. Amorosi

"My work is making records and singing," writes Will Oldham in an e-mail. "Beyond that, my need and desire to express motivations or inner feelings -- which come and go -- is pretty minimal. And since I don't really know you, nor your audience -- nor mine -- it is hard to try and answer fairly many of these deeply personal questions."

In other words, the single-cell unit behind Palace, Bonnie Prince Billy and Push isn't very interested in playing the rock star/rock journalist game of dissection and explication.

Refreshing and honest, sure. But most of Oldham's work requires nothing less than deeply personal questioning. For while one never assumes another's writing is autobiographical, any journalist worth salt or silt would want to know what moves Oldham.

Painstakingly detailed and bittersweet impressions on cinematography and orogenic sex ripple through his oeuvre, most pertinently on the new Bonnie Prince Billy CD, Master and Everyone (Drag City), and the bridge of the title track: "Constancy and love is a joke."

"That song is very brash, isn't it?" says Oldham. "The lyrics come from an Italian folk song." His has been a brash career, of odd jobs (he was a child actor best recalled as the baby preacher in John Sayles' Matewan) and provocative obsessions: Death. Love. Sex. God. Reasons to wriggle from all four.

Known first for Palace's lo-fi aesthetic and eloquent, cranky lyrics, Oldham now writes in a bed of Appalachian ambient dub and found soundscapes that vary from soft suppleness to hard ardor, depending on which narrator he's become.

Asked if there are specifics as to what delineates the Bonnie persona from the Will, or how that separation affects the characters of which he writes, Oldham avoids the question with cryptic bits of trivia: "Did you know that Billy the Kid's real name was William Bonny? I didn't remember that until long after thinking up the Bonnie Billy name."

Try getting him to detail his past -- ending Palace, moving from the grand sadness of There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You to pleasantly sensual works like Ease Down the Road -- and he tenses up.

"Buddy, I am trying to deal with the day-to-day here," he says. "But it is nice to hear your subjective visualization of these periods."

Though his bare-bones arrangements (toe-taps, wheezy guitar strings and squeaking fingerslides are always audible), weary sing-songiness and woozy harmonies are often compared to Neil Young and John Fahey, his new Master is more akin to Paul Simon: whispery, elegiac, elated, fascinated by the minutiae of relationships.

As Oldham wraps his dry passionate purrs around uplifting-but-mood-swinging songs about wanting/not wanting/needing a wife, you sense Simon's arch humor hovering. Despite having written the forlornly fuck-hungry (but by no means foul) tunes "You Have Cum in Your Hair and Your Dick is Hanging Out" and "Big Balls," Oldham the artist is a subtly sardonic romanticist with a Bible-belt wrapped tightly around his waist. "Yeah, it must be a part of who and what I am," says Oldham of the divine inspiration that wafts throughout much of his lyrical mien. God is and has always been etched into Oldham's work, a constant presence, whether doomed ("I See a Darkness") or ecstatic (the new "Joy and Jubilee").

"Isn't it?" enthuses Oldham about the near-radical ebullience of "Joy" in comparison to the rest of his back catalog. "I love that song." But if the miter of holiness is in one hand, his dick is firmly in the other as he intones frankly about finding the other fish in the restless sea. He is dedicated to the idea of neither sex being tied down, a laissez-faire zipless-fuck mentality that's powerfully refreshing, especially where angular folk sounds are concerned.

"What's the sexiest thing? A cock (mine) and a pussy (hers)," says Oldham.

He has, since the second half of the '90s, moved incrementally with each release, to a comfort level that straddles innate darkness and struggles to love/be loved/commit with a newfound informality. The result on Master is a communal sound that, despite what he sees as self-containment ("Like a movie: Rather than needing association with other work credited to an artist, records should be filed under titles," he asserts), gets open and breezier with each song.

Oldham now sings with tuneful ease of a life of needs and requirements -- patience, food, hermeticism -- that jump from Master's first tune,"The Way," to the "Hard Life" finale of wedded bliss and optimism. Rather than commit to psychic solidarity or emotional fruition, he says simply, "It gives the illusion of progress to the record," a canard that every great artist, from Picasso to Proust, has used time and time again. Oh well.

Will Oldham performs Thu., Jan. 30, 7 p.m., $10, with Ned Oldham and Long Live Death, First Unitarian Church Sanctuary, 22nd and Chestnut sts. Tickets available at 800-594-TIXX or Spaceboy Music, 409 South St.

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