Post Description

Country, experimental. 

Will Oldham goes all Nashville on us but maintains his outsider status with style.
We’ve precious few mavericks left alive these days but Will Oldham certainly fits the bill with his lengthy and much varied discography stretching over 30 years now. From the weird Appalachia of the early Palace albums to the much more conventional retreads of his songs on “Sings Greatest Palace Music” and collaborations with acts as varied as Trembling Bells, Tortoise and Bill Callahan, Oldham is never predictable.

“The Purple Bird” sits at the more conventional end of his spectrum. The album was recorded in Nashville and it finds Oldham in the hands of a producer for the first time, that producer being David “Ferg” Ferguson who Oldham first encountered during the recording of Johnny Cash’s “American III: Solitary Man” when Cash recorded Oldham’s ‘I See A Darkness’. As Oldham writes of the encounter, “Ferg was at the board, in charge of the recording aspect of the session. There was something about David Ferguson that put me at ease.  Cash was sweet as hell, and Ferg was gentle as well but also contained and charismatic. There was absolutely no detectable bullshit.  Everybody did what he was there to do, fully and fantastically.” They became firm friends and when Oldham was considering his next album he asked Ferguson to set up some “Nashville writing sessions” which eventually led to the songs we hear on “The Purple Bird” (named for a drawing painted by Ferguson when he was in 12th grade and which hangs, framed, in his apartment). In addition Ferguson hand-picked the musicians who include bluegrass hero Tim O’Brien. As ever with Oldham however, this is not a traditional Nashville album. As it slowly unravels it reveals a set of songs which are unlikely ever to grace the stage of the Opry.

The opening song, ‘Turn To Dust (Rolling On)’ slopes in sounding somewhat like The Band sounded like back in 1970 with sweeps of organ, fiddle and guitar breaks as Oldham sounds biblical in his acceptance that we’re all ultimately doomed to die. Death and the Devil feature in the miasmic convolutions of ‘London May’ while ‘Sometimes It’s Hard To Breathe’ is a drone fuelled threnody with the band sounding for all the world as if they had inhaled Fairport Convention’s ‘A Sailor’s Life’ before the recording. Meanwhile ‘Downstream’, which features guest vocals from Jim Anderson, has a slight Celtic lilt to it as they sing of the slow contamination of the environment

On a more optimistic note there’s the jaunty country outing which is ‘Sleeping With The Dogs Tonight’ (co–written with Tommy Prine), the polka-inflected ‘Guns Are For Cowards’ which feeds into Oldham’s sense of the absurd and the fleet-footed ‘The Water’s Fine’. There’s a fine degree of yearning on ‘One Of These Days I’m Going To Spend The Night With You’ which seems to encapsulate the inner thoughts of a man enamoured of a friend but far too afraid to say so. While this might have fallen into a stalker like rabbit hole, Oldham redeems it with the final line which says it’s just a silly old song. It’s followed by one of the highlights of the album, ‘Is My Living In Vain’ with Oldham sounding, quite wondrously, like a young John Martyn on a glorious and shimmering song. The album concludes with Tim O’Brien joining in on a fine ramshackled back porch country song on ‘Our Home’, a back to the roots cry for the simple life. “Harvest the honey and string up the beans/That’s how we make it our home/ Do it by hand and screw the machines” he sings before concluding “Leggo my ego and embrace my id/ That’s how we make it our home.”

By our reckoning there hasn’t been a poor Oldham album over over the past three decades and “The Purple Bird” is another feather in his cap.

Tracks:
01. Turned To Dust (Rolling On)
02. London May
03. Tonight With The Dogs I'm Sleeping
04. Boise, Idaho
05. The Water's Fine
06. Sometimes It's Hard to Breathe
07. New Water
08. Guns Are For Cowards
09. Downstream
10. One of These Days (I'm Gonna Spend the Whole Night With You)
11. Is My Living in Vain
12. Our Home

Staat er compleet op, 10% pars mee gepost. Met zeer veel dank aan de originele poster. Laat af en toe eens weten wat je van het album vindt. Altijd leuk, de mening van anderen. Oh ja, MP3 doe ik niet aan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQbAPyGiPwI