Album Review: I Made a Place by Bonnie "Prince" Billy

It is an album focussed on the lessons to be learned, and joy to be found in the study of our own pasts, unconnected from the impossible to predict uncertainty of the future. The earthy folk of the music provides a tangible connection with our collective histories and the riches they offer to explore. There is a pause from the immediacy of the everyday and the fixation with what comes next as Oldham opts instead to enjoy the here and now, and celebrate what has come before.

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Will Oldham, aka Bonnie Prince Billy, has over recent years released covers albums of songs by Merle Haggard, Susanna, The Mekons and even himself, and collaborated with Bryce Dessner, Eighth Blackbird and Bitchin Bajas. Yet somehow I Made A Place is the first album of entirely new Bonnie Prince Billy songs since 2011's Wolfroy Goes To Town. Oldham has played around with musical styles through his career to date.

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What instruments spring to mind at the mention of "alt-folk?" Acoustic guitars? Banjos? Fiddles?   If bawdy, blissful brass wasn't your first answer, you wouldn't be alone. Yet the backing horns on Bonnie "Prince" Billy's latest album, I Made a Place, give its songs an eccentric swagger that is compelling, captivating, heart-wrenching and utterly unpredictable. That's true on everything from their soothing moans on "Dream Awhile" to their grooving, belching bursts on "Thick Air," not to mention their blissful buzz on lead single "Squid ….

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On January 13, 2018, an emergency alert lit up phones throughout Hawaii, warning of a ballistic missile approaching the island. "SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER," it read. "THIS IS NOT A DRILL." Among the recipients were Will and Elsa Hansen Oldham, who had recently arrived at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park as artists-in-residence and who were suddenly preparing to spend their last moments together.

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"The Eye of the Squid" pitches and rolls, a boisterous sea chanty in its wheeze of accordion, its blowsy bouts of saxophone. It's as light-hearted a song as you could ever expect to hear from Bonnie Prince Billy, and yet strikes deep at what it means to be alive. Will Oldham's voice comes in serenely melodic flutes and flurries, as he sings, "Time to reclaim what is there/Time to recapture the world/Potty-train a Kodiak bear/If you're a boy, then dance like a girl." In this first album of original material since the lovely Wolfroy Comes to Town, the sublime is mixed with giddy swoops of string band exuberance.

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"L ooking for a recommendation for an artist residency that takes small families with two working artist parents?" tweeted Will Oldham recently. The Americana outrider with the shining pate is now coupled up, with small fry on board. His newest album sings mellifluously of true love ("complete transfiguration", according to You Know the One) and memory boxes, of building something lasting.

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