Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy on Making Music from the Heart of Everything

April 13, 2026
Culture & Music
Photography:
Urban Wyatt
Words:
Gemma Lacey

Will Oldham writes songs the way other people carry talismans. A folk lyric posted to him by a pen pal, married to a melody from a Smithsonian Folkways recording of Indonesian music, becomes something so entirely his own it feels like it could only have come from one place. A child’s crayon drawing, framed on a friend’s wall, becomes the title and cover image of a record. A fleur-de-lis, symbol of the Boy Scouts and the Bourbon dynasty, gets tattooed on his body at eighteen — at the precise moment he thought he was leaving Louisville for good.

He has been releasing music since the early 1990s, as Palace Brothers, Palace Music, and most enduringly as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy — and across those decades has built one of the most singular bodies of work in American music: rooted in folk and country tradition, lit up by a literary intelligence that moves between Dostoevsky and bluegrass harmony without breaking stride, and driven always by a devotion to emotional truth over intellectual construction.

 

He has just released We Are Together Again via Domino/No Quarter, quickly following last year’s The Purple Bird — and together the two albums feel less like separate projects than two movements of the same larger thought about where music comes from, and what it is for.

  • There is a framed drawing on the wall of a recording apartment above a garage in Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee. It is a child’s artwork — labelled The Purple Bird, made by one David Ferguson, aged approximately seven, at Union Chapel Elementary School. Ferg, as he is known to friends and collaborators, is now one of Nashville’s most revered record producers. He chose to frame it. He chose to hang it where guests sleep and work and make music with him. Oldham noticed it and found himself unable to leave it alone.
“Is this Ferg’s Rosebud?” he says, invoking Citizen Kane. “I don’t even know. I’m not going to ask him.” Instead, he borrowed it — the title, the image — and asked artist Lori Damiano to re-render it for the cover. The connective tissue of the album, he explains, is the friendship itself, something a producer credit can’t quite name: “You can’t really express that with a producer credit, because that sounds very formal. And it wasn’t. It’s not formal.”
The Purple Bird came about with a spirit of productive accident. Oldham reached out to Ferguson — a close friend of some twenty-five years — simply wanting to visit. Ferg suggested writing sessions. Oldham agreed easily, thinking, as he puts it: “This is just what some people do — we’re going to write something, that’s fine.” What followed was eight sessions, seven co-written songs, and a recording experience he describes as unlike anything he’d been part of before. Ferguson assembled what Oldham calls “one of the greatest possible assemblages of session musicians available right now in Nashville” — players capable of walking into a room with an unfamiliar song and finding its centre within minutes. The method was simple: Oldham sang, and they followed. “Ferg said: just start singing, and they’re going to go where you go.” He searches for the right image to describe what it felt like from the inside. “Like your niece standing in front of a mirror singing — that’s kind of me in this recording studio, with a little more adult-based intention. But just: where do I want to go with this song? And they’re ready to go there.” He calls it alchemical. Even his own voice, he says, found a fluidity it doesn’t usually have, buoyed by the strength of the players around him.
And yet even as that Nashville record was taking shape, another set of songs was waiting for him back home.
We Are Together Again was begun before the Nashville sessions and returned to last spring — ten songs recorded at End of an Ear Studios in Louisville with his current tour mates Jacob Duncan (flute and saxophone) and Thomas Deakin (clarinet, whistle, baritone electric guitar, accordion, cornet), alongside Ryder McNair, Chris Bush, Ned Oldham and Erin Hill. Jim Marlowe engineered and co-produced. Where The Purple Bird was shaped by one deep friendship and the electricity of elite session players encountering his songs for the first time, this record draws its energy from community — the specific, living community of Louisville.
Asked whether he was writing from certainty or curiosity, Oldham’s answer is precise: “About equal parts. It’s good to be in shape when setting out on an expedition.” “This record was made closer to the Ohio River than any I’ve been involved with since 1993’s Palace Brothers There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You,” he has said. “Louisville’s current-and-past vital musical community is highlighted on every song.” Catherine Irwin, who sang on the Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy release Ease Down the Road, returns on “Hey Little” and “Vietnam Sunshine.” Lacey Guthrie, Tory Fisher and Katie Peabody — the three frontwomen of Duchess — sing together on the opening and closing tracks, which Oldham describes as “parallel odes to the beast that is fear.” The first track shared from the record, “They Keep Trying To Find You,” arrives with a video produced by Jake Forman and choreographed and directed by Abi Elliott.

 

Louisville runs through everything. Oldham has spent decades turning the city over in his mind, and lately his thinking has taken on an almost geological quality. He describes a place founded on a geographic accident: a stretch of the Ohio River that becomes unnavigable at a set of falls, forcing boats to stop, unload, and reload half a mile downstream. The city grew around that mandatory pause — and he finds himself wondering how much of that is in the character of its people. “Imagining that that is possibly an interesting metaphor for what’s happened here musically,” he says, “this place where things are meant to be going, and then are forced to stop, forced to be handled by the population before they move on to another place.”
He also speaks about Kentucky’s pre-colonial history as a sacred, deliberately unsettled hunting ground — land that the Indigenous nations living north of the Ohio River understood not to settle, and which the arriving white settlers defiled. “We live with that defilement as also part of the DNA of what the city is and what the state is,” he says. “And how does that affect the character of the music we’re trying to make?” Alongside that history, he credits a mid-twentieth century cultural investment in Louisville’s arts infrastructure — significant enough, he says, that his generation grew up understanding creativity as genuinely valuable in a way that wouldn’t have been true in many comparable cities.
There’s a freedom that Louisville gives his work. Starting with his early work, and the notable Riding,” from the 1993 debut There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You, which arrived with enough provocation to keep critics busy for years. Trouser Press called it “an epic first-person account of incestuous lust”; Drowned in Sound crowned it “everybody’s favourite song about incest,” reading Oldham’s use of hillbilly imagery as a reach toward “the repressed, the sinful.” Ask him about it now and he reaches instead for Dostoevsky’s The Double, Nabokov’s Despair, Conrad’s The Secret Sharer — the literary tradition of the self encountering itself in the form of another. “Incest being definitely, absolutely, 110% symbolic,” he says. “The idea being: how frightening the world outside of us is, and how complexly comforting ourselves can be, at our best. And ourselves is potentially someone in our household. Blood of our blood.” What we crave, he suggests, is someone who has experienced some of the same joys and traumas — someone with whom connection doesn’t require the full labour of explanation. “It’s so difficult to share your story with anybody else.”
That same attentiveness to connection — rather than construction — is central to how he approaches songwriting. He is deliberately resistant to the cerebral side of the craft. While the musicians he works with discuss chord structures and amp settings, he keeps that at arm’s length, not out of laziness but out of instinct. “There needs to be space for the recognition of the potential life of a given song. That would be crowded out by those kinds of — important information.” He is explicit about why: “The purpose of the music is connection, and connection can only really be circled around, because it’s outside of language. Most of it is outside of language.” Ask him where songs begin, and he reaches for an image rather than an answer: “I think there are feelings and ideas, and then the job is trying to grab those wild beasts for long enough to tag them and then let them go again in the form of song — see where they go, what they encounter, who they devour.”
He also pushes back against the music industry’s mythology around creative pace — the idea that releasing work frequently is somehow unusual or undisciplined. For Oldham this is simply a corporate artefact: record labels extended promotion cycles to maximise returns and in doing so, he argues, destroyed the natural rhythm of creative life.
“If musicians were told we need a record every six months, we as audience members would be experiencing something wonderful, because that’s how fast most creative lines go.” He is genuinely baffled by the alternative. “What are you doing with your life? Like, what are you doing with your life?”
Two records in close succession, then — one made in Nashville with a long-trusted friend and world-class players, one made back home drawing Louisville’s community tightly around him. Together they read as a statement about what sustains a creative life: the depth of individual friendship on one hand, the wider web of community on the other.
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 how we will refuse to surrender ourselves. We Are Together Again feels like an answer. In Oldham’s songs — and in the circle of others gathered beneath the name Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy — friendship, community, and the stubborn joy of making art together become a means of persistence. Not a denial of collapse, which would be delusion, but a kind of defiance: remaining fully human, fully joyful, in a world with a diminishing horizon.
Does devotion outweigh doubt on a record like this, or is the tension still the point? “Yes, devotion outweighs doubt,” he says. “Doubt is inescapable, even crucial. Devotion to what we know: that we are here for each other, from the beginning on through to who-knows-what. That’s the privilege of rational thinking, as well as of magical thinking.” It is as close as he comes to a manifesto. It is enough.
Somewhere in a Tennessee apartment, a purple bird waits on a wall. Someone made it at age seven and kept it all these years for reasons they couldn’t explain. Down by the Ohio River, in a studio in Louisville, ten more songs have been made with everyone Oldham could gather close. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes it is everything.
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