Album Review

Bonnie "Prince" Billy
The Letting Go
(Drag City, 2006)


This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow--
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

Emily Dickinson - "After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes"



Bonnie "Prince" Billy saw a Darkness back in 1999, and he has been pursued by it ever since. But now it seems that he is finally giving in to it. I See a Darkness was a masterwork of claustrophobic existential fear, but his new album The Letting Go seems to explore the opposite - sweet surrender. The album does touch on the idea of surrendering to mortality (ie "God's Small Song"), but seems to focus much more on the idea of giving in to love, despite the facts that:
a) love is fickle and painful.
b) the world is insane, and possibly meaningless.
Heavy stuff, to be sure, but Bonnie (aka Will Oldham) has such a light touch that it never feels like he is forcing it. And, most importantly, he does not weigh his ideas down with value judgments, so it is up to the listener to decide whether his surrender is a victory or a defeat (or a complex combination of both). That is the brilliance of his craft - he expresses multiple emotions at once, jumbled amalgamations of love, bliss, hopelessness, and fear that become so much more human and complex than the average songwriter's portrait of a single emotion.
The album opens with the gentle, sad, vaguely cinematic strings of "Love Comes To Me." The strings give way to simple guitar strumming and Oldham's rich straw-and-honey voice:

When the number gets so high

Of the dead flying through the sky

Oh, I don't know why

Love comes to me

And thus he lays out the primary theme of the album in this deceptively simple opening verse. Throughout the rest of the LP he complicates, confounds, and expands on this theme - but the basic concept is right there, in heart-palpitatingly simple beauty.

Since the album holds together so well conceptually, it is surprising to realize how musically varied it actually is. The strings are used to much darker effect on "Cursed Sleep" and "The Seedling," providing chilling counterpoints to the hushed contentment of the quieter, prettier numbers. The lo-fi blues rag "Cold and Wet" is unlike anything else on the album, but still manages to fit in. On "God's Small Song," a swirl of shifting drones surround Oldham's voice and barely-strummed guitar, giving the song a celestial weightlessness.

And the vocal contributions of Dawn McCarthy (of Faun Fables) cannot go without mention. Her shapeshifting background vocals wander lightly in and out of the songs, appearing strikingly and then vanishing into the mist. And when it does occasionally sit down to join Oldham in a more traditional duet style, her voice proves to be a perfect partner for his. Perhaps the loveliest example of this is on "Big Friday," when she joins him in an old-world folk harmony to reiterate what seems to be the primary idea at the center of the album:

And if I had to live
This is how it should be
To have such a woman with me

Like all Bonnie "Prince" Billy albums, The Letting Go is a grower. The songs might not blow you away on the first listen, but they will lodge themselves somewhere deep inside of you and reveal more and more each time you listen to them. And somehow, despite the conflicting emotions and ideas at play within them, they well comfort you.

Rating: Fantastic (9)

MP3: Love Comes To Me

Buy The Letting Go

http://bonnieprincebilly.com/