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His rather full ‘passing knowledge’ of the Bonnie Prince includes that he was a child film star, starring in the indie hit ‘Matewan’, an authentic picture of the wild west and workers’ rights before he started producing beautiful music and avoiding the limelight as strenuously as his genius allowed.

His work of late has been collaborative such as his recent covers album co-starring Tortoise, which has covers of Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’ and Richard and Linda Thompson’s ‘The Calvary Cross’ and a range of work under various names. As a visit to his fansite will confirm, he is truly prodigious, appearing in various guises on records by artists far flung and so it is often difficult to spot all the places he rears his head.

The Letting Go is full of the mournful tunes that you come to expect from the Prince (real name Will Oldham), tunes full of sadness that nonetheless make you want to smile. It’s difficult to pull out the best tracks when each one competes for its place with soft insistence and paints as vivid an image as the songs around it.

The sparse accompaniment to the standard blues folk core group comes in the form of backing vocals from Dawn McCarthy, strings, flugelhorn and a touch of piano, although — as he credits on the sleeve — ‘other things may have been used as well’.

There is a real rootsy alt-country folk feel, dipping into bluesy refrains (‘Cold and Wet’) and I can only compare his lyrics and arrangements — although not the musical context — to the genius of the best of Blind Melon’s Shannon Hoon. He also has the edge of the manic depressive as had Hoon.

In The Letting Go there is a real feel of memories dragged up, images of summers and winters past, of fleeting relationships that surface in the odd line here or there, that bring back real pain. In the final track ‘I Called You Back’ he invokes a perfect love lost, dragging back a ghost from his past, and this feeling that recalling the past can free you of it runs through the whole album.

As my brother informed me ‘he has something of a Midas touch’, and this is pure gold.

Links:
Bonnie Prince Billy
Rather amusing clips promoting the album on YouTube
and an album preview