When Will Oldham performs as folk musician Bonnie “Prince” Billy, he reaches his way toward a parallel reality shared only by the musicians and the audience sharing a room together. The path forward is dark and unknown, but the song’s structure provides a roadmap shaped by the energy of the people in the room. With any luck, Oldham and his audience will find their way to that parallel reality when he makes his debut at The Ark on Oct. 19.
What is certain is that the performance will be a unique one. Oldham says each night’s setlist usually comes together only a few hours before the show with 35 years of songs to draw on, not only under the Bonnie “Prince” Billy moniker but also under his own name and others.
The room itself is an important piece of finding that private, intimate place apart where the music can bring musician and audience together even if only for a moment. There are certain elements Oldham seeks out in a venue to enable the experience.
“You need to be in a place that’s small enough and where the sound works well enough and where people feel that their focus is valued and maybe for a small period of time unbreakable,” Oldham said.
Finding connection in the internet age
There is a need for these places like The Ark where attention is shared between human beings. This is especially true as the internet has increasingly made people feel alienated not only from the people around them but also from themselves and their own interests.
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Over only a handful of decades, people have offloaded their means of relating to others and to their own interests in things like music to the internet. Now they are discovering that “the demons in hell who run the internet,” as Oldham refers to them, do not have their best interests at heart.
“They want you to think that they can make your most resonant and most personal decisions for you,” Oldham said. “But really they can’t. It’s impossible. All you have to do is unplug it. What happens when you unplug it? Well, this music is still here. These people are still here.”
Preparing for transformation
Although the pace of Oldham’s output as Bonnie “Prince” Billy has never been particularly slow, his work of the past couple of years has felt particularly prolific and varied. After 2025’s The Purple Bird found Bonnie “Prince” Billy heading towards a more polished Nashville country sound. He followed it up in March of this year with a celebration of his Louisville, Ky., roots on We Are Together Again. Then came September’s Ghosts of American Psychonauts, a live album performed in the shadow of the Jan. 2025 Los Angeles fires, and still to come on Oct. 30 is The Outsider, The Music Of Jules De Corte, a collaboration with the Linus Quartett celebrating the titular blind, Dutch singer-songwriter.
Oldham describes the many different paths he has traveled down on these releases as his way of provisioning himself for an upcoming journey. Eventually that sense of alienation brought on by the internet will reach a turning point.
“It feels as if people are recognizing that the lights are going out in some way and [are] putting value again in recognizing each other as as real living things with with complicated relationships, making eye contact, and willing to have a conversation that maybe two years ago people wouldn’t have been willing to have,” Oldham said.
This is where folk acts like Bonnie “Prince” Billy come in. Armed with his collected musical provisions, he will be there ready to share them with other people and to draw those people together. In this, Oldham says he is inspired by the words of his opener, Traverse City musician Laurel Premo, that we should “hold [music] gently enough so that it can be connective medicine.”
This is perhaps the scene Oldham imagines in the repeated lines of “Why Is The Lion?” and “Bride Of The Lion,” the opening and closing tracks on We Are Together Again: “To rise from the floor of the ring and hear someone sing / Is it my voice, or, better yet, ours? / Or everyone’s, everyone’s starting to bring / Intention that scrubs and that scours // Scours the filth from the light, leaving us sparkling bright.”
In the face of a technological ecosystem that has served to keep us cowering and scared of one another, maybe a night spent raising our voices with a beloved artist can draw us all a little closer together and leave us too sparkling bright.
