Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s We Are Together Again reviewed: Will Oldham’s homecoming streak finds new richness

There are several ages of song for Will Oldham, loosely put. There are the early years, as Palace, where knotty, twisted melodies and imagery cohered in a style that felt old as the hills, an archaic song fronted by an enigmatic force. You couldn’t quite get a handle on him, this singer, and that mystery was seductive. It made some sort of sense in context, too: the community of musicians Oldham was involved with in Louisville, the likes of Slint, Evergreen and David Grubbs, and also his loose alignment with other artists on his home label Drag City – Smog, Royal Trux – was rich with characters who made creative life of the clandestine and quixotic.

Then there’s a second era, which feels curious and exploratory, Oldham moving out from under Palace and slipping, slowly, into a new character, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (these characters make sense for someone who began their artistic career in acting, but never quite found the solace they searched for in that calling). There are beautiful albums here, like 1999’s I See A Darkness and 2003’s Master And Everyone, but also a constant shapeshifting, a desire to try on so many outfits, working with the likes of Matt Sweeney, Bitchin Bajas, Tortoise and Trembling Bells.

How, then, to grapple with Oldham’s return to his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, and a string of albums over the last seven or so years, extended now by We Are Together Again, that feel renewed, simultaneously the most straightforward of Oldham’s catalogue, and yet still rich with the oneiric and mysterious qualities that drew so many listeners to his art? It seems wrong to suggest this is a ‘mature’ phase of Oldham’s writing: he’s slyer than that, even as both lyrics and delivery feel more disarmed here, more natural, than ever.

Perhaps it’s partly about the new couching Oldham has found for his songs. Recording among friends and family in Louisville – and We Are Together Again is notable for his reunion with brother Ned, himself responsible for many great albums as part of The Anomaonon – there’s been a sea-change in how these records sound, both in terms of playing and arrangement, and regarding their overarching mood. You can trace this development from the charms of 2019’s I Made A Place through its successors – the quietened Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, the brightly lit Nashville set The Purple Bird – but it finds its richest flourish here.

It’s also there in the way Oldham uses his voice. He’s always had a canny relationship with its possibilities, much as, in our Q&A, he acknowledges early limitations. For some, those limitations were the charm of Oldham’s voice, the way capability strained against ambition. But the newer Oldham voice feels unforced, not natural so much as settled: as in nestling comfortably within the folds of the songs written and arranged, and more elliptically, in Oldham finding a voice to settle into, a comfort that’s still striving for expression beyond the immediate.

You can hear this, most beautifully, in the more intimate moments on We Are Together Again – the sweet sweep of “(Everybody’s Got A) Friend Named Joe”, where Oldham’s lovely line entwines with Maggie Halfman’s earthy, everyday melodicism; it’s also there in the next song, “Vietnam Sunshine”, where sweet, punch-drunk brass frames the writing beautifully. This time Oldham is accompanied by Catherine Irwin of Freakwater, who also joins in on the following “Hey Little”, an ode to Oldham’s children.

Tellingly, Oldham encouraged his arranger, cousin Ryder McNair, to garner inspiration from Madonna’s “Dear Jessie” for the arrangements on “Hey Little”, a sign that Oldham’s grasps the depth behind the seemingly ‘simplest’ of songs. The presence of Irwin on both songs, and Sally Timms on “Life Is Scary Horses”, gestures out to other creative relationships, too – Irwin is a founding member of American country outfit Freakwater, Timms a long-time member of the Mekons.

That latter band have long been totemic for Oldham, and indeed he reflected in interview, “I got so deeply Mekonical back in my late teens.” That relationship back to Oldham’s youthful love of Mekons, and of Freakwater as parallel spirits over the decades, somehow feels important to We Are Together Again, in the way it wraps up a world in 12 songs, and that world’s histories.

If you catch echoes of Oldham past in “Life Is Scary Horses”, too, well, you’re not hearing things: Oldham himself confesses, “the song ‘Life Is Scary Horses’ is a rip-off of Sally Timms’ ‘Horses’, and Timms sings on it!” Rip-off seems slightly dismissive, actually; it’s closer to the truth to say the songs share the same psychic space. Oldham covered the Timms original (a co-write with Jon Langford) on a Palace seven-inch back in 1994; the Timms original is from her 1988 album Somebody’s Rocking My Dreamboat. Each mutation tells us something new about how songs change over time, are passed down, or in the case of “Life Is Scary Horses”, are borrowed and re-cast.

The connection to Freakwater is more local – Oldham relays that the younger sister of the band’s Janet Bean was his sixth-grade locker partner; Ned Oldham and Catherine Irwin were also members of Louisville post-punk bands Languid & Flaccid and the Dickbrains, respectively. These relationships feel somehow significant to what Oldham is doing with these songs, this music – finding a place for songs to nestle in together, carefully tended to by writer, producer and musicians, bringing local community and local history into the songs in intimate ways. It makes for an album whose strength is in the way it toggles between that intimacy and an expansiveness that tells us much about how Oldham’s world has expanded across the decades of his artmaking.

Of course, there’s the sheer pleasure of playing, listening and being. Some of We Are Together Again’s most joyous moments seem in direct contravention of the album’s more anxious lyrical explorations, where fear and the implications of the Anthropocene, gnomic observations like “O life is full of trouble” or “The human times have come and gone”, hit differently when surrounded by Oldham’s subtle gestures towards renewal, towards potential and possibility, and towards the simple pleasure of being together, again. “Vietnam Sunshine” seems central to the messaging here, a kind of hope against hope – “Now we restructure the whole of society/Place bliss and equality right at its core.”

That energy infects the musicianship on the album, ultimately, and accounts for the ease and delight of many of the songs. It’s something Oldham comments on, too, when asked if anything surprised him about the album: “I was surprised, during the mixing process with Jim [Marlowe], how fun the record is to listen to.” It’s moments like that that tell us Oldham is still deep in the valley of his song. As he says, when pondering what song can do, for both the writers and listeners: “This is my life’s work. This is what I am trying to know, with everything I do.”

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