A simple grammar for difficult lives: you could try to summarize it like this, the essence of country music. That is, how to tell in a language made to speak to everyone that living and dying are terribly complicated things.
Will Oldham knows it very well, given that with his rural soul he talked about a whole career, especially in the shoes of Bonnie “Prince” Billy. This time, however, there is something more. Because “The Purple Bird” presents itself as a real move to the heart of Nashville, with the complicity of a decisive name: that of David Ferguson.
More than a simple producer, Ferguson in Nashville is a kind of institution, a veteran of the console He worked with people like Johnny Cash, John Prine, Sturgill Simpson … and he was precisely at the time of the “American recordings” of the black man in black that he and Oldham met. Since then, a angular and visceral friendship has cemented between the two, capable of convincing Oldham to trust as rarely had happened to him before. Giving life to one of the most engaging works of his endless discography.
“If you're asking my opinion/ I'm just an ordinary man”. Usually, in a song like the initial “Turned to Dust (Rolling on)”, Oldham would have sought the most oblique path to get to the point. Here, however, it lets itself be transported by the heat of the plane and of theHammondindulges without hesitation the clarity of the melody. “Right is right, Wrong Is Wrong/ No Matter What Side You're Standing On”, sings by dissolving the node of our state of universal war with disarming wisdom.
“You just sing”, it was Ferguson's recommendation, “all the others will come behind you”. Thus, Oldham managed to find the key to a type of unpublished abandonment for him, despite all the collaborations that dotted his path: “When I resentful my voice, I took a step back and I said to myself: Oh, this is a person I had never met …”.
On the other hand, “The Purple Bird” is not only the result of the recordings alongside the “best band available in Nashville”, as proudly proclaims Ferguson. It is also the fruit of the real “Songwriting sessions” in which the Tennessee manufacturer involved Oldham: a collective writing exercise alongside songwriters such as Pat McLaughlin, Ronnie Bowman and John Anderson (who duets with Oldham on the notes of “Downstream”), which gives an unexpected classicism to the songs signed by Bonnie “Prince” Billy. The classicism of a “pre-digital world”, to say it with its own words, which has little to do with the return of thehype around the country universe.
In short, it is not to be surprised that the songs of the album open up to a flourishing of fiddlemandolin and vocal harmonies. THE'Honky Tonk Playful of “tonight with the dogs I'm sleeping” shines at the shimmer of the wind, the polka of “guns are for cowards” dance with the accordion, raising the voice against weapons through a chorus with an alcoholic flavor. Between the Dolceamara caress of “Boise, Idaho” and the existential lightness of “The Water's fine”, the moments that bring the Bonnie brand “Prince” Billy are more recognizable in an imprinted way, even in the end even those with the most shady shades, from “Sometimes It's Hard to Breathe” to “London May” (in which the initials of the verses go to compose the name of the friend. Ex-Botterist of Samhain, to whom the song is dedicated).
Oldham seems to contemplate the alchemy of these songs with an amazed gaze, as the image chosen for the cover suggests (based on the reworking of a childhood design by Ferguson), in which the “purple bird” of the title becomes a sort of symbolic figure of Nashville's music: “I wanted to depict myself in a sort of shock, awe and wonder in the face of this huge beast, because It is more or less what I have always tried during the realization of the disc “.
On the skeleton of an arpeggio, the voice of Oldham transforms “Is My Living into Vain?” of the Clark Sisters – also brought to the stage on the recent Italian tour – in a sort of rarefied gospel Appalachianwhere when the questions are in charge (“Is My Living in Vain?/ is my giving in vain?”) The impetus of a certainty replies: “No no, of course not/ it's not all in vain/ bicause up the road is eternal gain”. The challenge is to continue hoping even in the darkness of our times. The challenge is to be able to build a house again, as announced the festive step of “Our Home”, a place to really live. It is a choral hymn, a great ending that calls another apostle of the country on stage, Tim O'Brien. Hope is reborn from the simplest things, like the ability to look straight in the eyes: “Look in the Eyes of the People We Meet/ That's How We Make It Our Home”.
11/04/2025
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
