More Brother Rides — Palace Music

#365Songs: March 15

In the annals of modern music history, Will Oldham has to rank as one of the unlikeliest success stories ever.

This is a man who has written songs with titles like “You Have Cum in Your Hair and Your Dick Is Hanging Out.”

This is a man who has recorded lyrics like:

Come a little dog
Come a little dog
And had a little dog
Killed a little cat, and I killed a little dog
Killed a little cat, and I killed a little dog
Come a little dog
Killed a little cat, and I killed a little dog
Woof-woof

This is a man who changed his name and/or his band’s name at least half a dozen times over half a dozen records—starting with Palace Brothers, and leading on up to, most recently, Bonnie Prince Billy.

It is under that last name that he crossed over into highly unlikely mainstream success.

His song “I See A Darkness” was selected for the Rick Rubin-helmed American III: Solitary Man from Johnny Cash—the third installment in Rubin’s shameless Cash-pimping trilogy.

It’s a terrible version, as are most of the songs in that series. Yes, heresy, I know. And to be clear, I don’t begrudge Mr. Cash an iota of his success. He deserved it. But those albums were largely awful—a triumph of late-stage capitalist style over anything resembling substance.

Oldham’s own version of the song, on the other hand, was a tremulous and deeply moving masterpiece.

The album—also called I See A Darkness—was a genuine masterwork. But as with many of the greatest works of art, it was both a masterly culmination of all that came before, and a harbinger of all the lesser work to come. After all his years of true weirdness, Oldham began to become a caricature of himself. But again, I See A Darkness was simply incredible. A virtually flawless album.

That’s most certainly not the case with any of Oldham’s preceding works. They’re all flawed, but beautifully, maddeningly, mesmerizingly so.

Oldham’s signature warble is as nasally tuneless as Neil Young at his whiniest, as creepily white-guy-ish as Gordon Gano at his creepiest, and as mournfully mopey as Nick Drake at his depressiest.

In fact, if you could somehow bubble your way into a cauldron’s worth of Neil Young’s “Down by the River,” “To The Kill” by the Violent Femmes, and Nick Drake’s “Black-Eyed Dog,” you’d kinda have the Palace/Palace Brothers/Palace Music/Bonnie Prince Billy/Will Oldham vocal sound.

As to the music, it’s sort of lo-fi guitar rock a la Folk Implosion meets Guided by Voices, interwoven with threads of Dock Boggs and Roscoe Holcomb, slowed down to VU-style heroin-folk, and with dashes of the afore-mentioned Neil Young and Nick Drake.

And that’s just the normal part.

Lyrically, Oldham is … well, kind of insane. My all-time favorite Will Oldham song is probably “Stablemates,” from the album Arise, Therefore. You can’t get it on Spotify, so I can’t recommend it for the #365Song series, but I’ll recommend it all the same. This is the lyric (all of which plays out over one droning chord):

How could one ever think anything’s permanent ?
How can you sleep when I’m going away ?
I haven’t a reason left in my head
To not go away

Haven’t you heard I’ve a new invitation
To give to a woman who sits and who works
Whose father does not ever not let her have
Something she wants

When will you work and when will you struggle
To die in a day and rescend your own fate ?
Cause I haven’t the time nor have I the need
To sit here and wait

It took her in when it just didn’t want to
When she came to the house and she sat in the yard
And she whistled and stared at the day make its way
It was found to be hard

It was hard to know you were the only lover
But that you would test it so carelessly
That you would ruin me if I would not have you
This is your way

The song I am recommending is from an album called Viva Last Blues, which was originally released under the Palace Music moniker. The opening track is “More Brother Rides,” and while it’s every bit the strange and mournful drone-along you’d expect, it’s also an uncharacteristically energetic performance, highlighted by a sinuous wah-wah pedal line that gives off some serious “Season of the Witch” vibes.

The vocal is just devastatingly weird, and it builds and builds across three verses, ratcheting up in intensity as Oldham’s vibrato-laden melodies become increasingly unhinged. When he unleashes at the top of the octave for the opening line of the third verse, you’re either hypnotized or terrified—or possibly both. And as to that third verse, it’s frankly incredible:

We’re busted up, so ragged down
And kissing and subsisting;
Our eyes glint wild and roll around
And the dog, he whines insisting,
He asks that we allow the sex
To make us unrecognizable;
That we allow slow violence
To prove us rebaptizable

I honestly don’t know of another singer-songwriter in the last 30 years worth of songwriting who has managed to be this good. And yes, it’s been nearly 30 years since Viva Last Blues was released, which is kind of shocking, and in my opinion, it still puts most modern, indie music to shame.

Also in my opinion, Oldham hasn’t done much worth listening to since he hit his apex with I See A Darkness, but if you start with that album, you’ll have seven years worth of remarkable music to count backwards through, and along the way, you’ll hit Viva Last Blues, and I promise you, you’ll be stunned.

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