BONNIE PRINCE BILLY - WE ARE TOGETHER AGAIN - NO QUARTER

However dimly we perceive it, we are living through a change of worlds. The one we were born into is slipping away, reshaped and denuded by human action. What remains is the question of what we will carry forward, and the manner in which we refuse to surrender ourselves. Will Oldham’s new album, We Are Together Again, feels like an answer to these questions. In Oldham’s songs - and in the circle of others who’ve gathered beneath the name Bonnie “Prince” Billy on this endeavor - friendship, community, and the stubborn joy of making art with others become a means of persistence. This isn’t to say that the record is a denial of collapse, which would be delusion, so much as that models defiance by remaining fully human, fully joyful, in a world with a diminishing horizon.. I’m talking about Oldham’s record, to be sure, but I think the answers he suggests in We Are Together Again speak to the only meaningful choices any of us can make at this point in all of the agonizing everything.

You can hear it in “Life Is Scary Horses,” when Oldham concedes, “The human times have come and gone. We must accept our rule is done, though love is sown and will live on. Come to me, let me see your eyes once more before the winter comes again.” The song modulates from minor to major in tone, almost sunny. This could read as irony, but to my ear it’s something closer to grace. That’s the spirit running through We Are Together Again: not denial, but fragile endurance and thankfulness for the moments we have.

“Friend Named Joe” and “Davey Dead” form the emotional heart of the record. In the former, Oldham sings “And when it feels like life is just a series of delusions, Joe can show that, even though it all feels like illusion, it’s real; and yesterday bears no resemblance to tomorrow. You fly towards death so full of life and love and joy and sorrow.” And in the latter, “If you destroy a child’s perspective, here’s what that child will do: be faced with unrelenting trial and render terror back at you.”

The album begins and ends with “Why is the Lion” and “Bride of the Lion,” which serve as thesis and conclusion, offering an invocation that seems to float above the rest of the work: “Hope of something beginning to rise from the floor of the ring…is it my voice, or, better yet, ours?” A melody cleaning the world, “scouring the filth from the light.” That’s what the album sounds like: people trying, not to fix anything, but to keep the light clear long enough to recognize each other in it.

The feeling of community is earned honestly since We Are Together Again is as much as gathering as a record or a statement. The studio becomes a meeting ground, a small republic of sound. Oldham’s friends, colleagues and even family— including — Tory Fisher, Lacey Guthrie, Katie Peabody, Catherine Irwin, Sally Timms, Maggie Halfman, Nuala Kennedy, Ned Oldham, Thomas Deakin, Jacob Duncan and Erin Hill - lend their voices, turning solitude into shared witness.

A sense of human beauty runs through everything here. Each voice remains distinct, yet folds into something larger. We Are Together Again doesn’t resolve fear; it meets it with harmony. It’s a record about the stubborn miracle of accompaniment. It’s about how we keep asking, and how, so long as there are voices to ask together, the asking itself becomes a kind of hope.

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From the desk of Will Oldham:

In 2019 we started in to exploring a process of making Louisville, KY records again, in Louisville studios with Louisville musicians. We did I Made a Place this way, then Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You. Things were going well, and then they started going better. The Purple Bird alit on our shoulders and sung its mating call into the ears of listeners all over the world, thanks primarily to the guidance of friend and producer David Ferguson. That bird is out flying around still, leaving abundances of smiling faces in its mighty wake. Having learned thus to fly, Bonny got back to work on the Louisville-first mandate, digging back into songs left open on the table during the Purple process. Bonny went into End of an Ear studio with Jim Marlowe engineering and co-producing; together they assembled a platoon of brilliant singers, blowers and pickers, including especially Bonny’s current tour mates Jacob Duncan (flute and saxophone) and Thomas Deakin (clarinet, whistle, baritone electric guitar, accordion, cornet). Chris Bush applied his modular synth skills to Duncan’s sax for “Davey Dead”. And harpist Erin Hill, who Oldham first met back in the 1980s when he was a wee lad, sings and plays all over “Davey Dead”. Oldham’s cousin Ryder McNair took a break from assistant-scoring Ridley Scott productions to write string quartet arrangements for these songs, and Will’s brother Ned returns after two decades to sing and play bass. This record was made closer to the Ohio River than any Oldham’s been involved with since 1993’s Palace Brothers There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You. Louisville’s current-and-past vital musical community is hi-lighted on every song. Catherine Irwin, who sang on the BPB release Ease Down the Road, is back here on “Hey Little” and “Vietnam Sunshine”. Lacey Guthrie, Tory Fisher and Katie Peabody, the three front women of the band Duchess, sing together on the opening and closing songs, parallel odes to the beast that is fear. The door was swung ajar by the Purple Bird, with its new take on homespun country bombast, and Bonny has stuck his gorgeous foot into that door to whisper his “I love you”s to all who need them (which we kind of all do). We start small, continue small, like oak tree seeds or the sperm-and-egg concoctions mixologized by the parents of movers-and-shakers since the dawn of time. Plant these songs into your soul’s brain, into your existence’s heart and the trees will grow and fruit and flourish and nourish. We thank you.