Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy: ‘With music, we give ourselves up. It’s when we’re allowed to be ourselves’ | Bonnie Prince Billy

One afternoon in Los Angeles in 2000, only seven years after he began releasing records, Will Oldham met two people who would “stay in my mind for the rest of my life”. The first was a gruff sound engineer, David “Ferg” Ferguson, who had been mentored by “Cowboy” Jack Clement, the renowned Sun Records producer who worked with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. The second, whom Oldham first saw in Rick Rubin’s studio hallway – “I’ll be unpacking this for the rest of my life” – was Johnny Cash.

“His physical size and his legacy towered over me at first and then steadily, warmly diminished,” Oldham remembers. Oldham had just turned 30; Cash was 68, ailing, but working hard on his third album of later-life covers, American Recordings III: Solitary Man. It included the title track from Oldham’s 1999 breakthrough album, I See a Darkness, his first under the moniker of Bonnie “Prince” Billy (one he’s been embarrassed about in the past, but loves now, “because the spirit of creation of that entity was that it had to be all about fun”).

A devastating, intimate song about love, the will to live and how depression lingers quietly, brutally, in so many people’s lives, I See a Darkness arrived like a hushed modern standard in the making. It’s since been covered – brilliantly – by flamenco superstar Rosalía; as a smooth, soulful ballad by Paul Young; and most recently as a club banger by Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor and techno producer Mike Simonetti (Taylor previewed it on his Instagram stories; it will be released later this year). Back in 2000, Cash asked Oldham to help him sing the track, while Ferg guided them warmly. Oldham and Ferg struck up a fast friendship thereafter, and for his new album, The Purple Bird, Oldham has Ferg as its sole producer, the first time this has happened in his 32-year career. “The producer is usually nominally me,” he says, a little embarrassed. “Although the ensemble is the producer, really.”

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, where he still lives today, Oldham began adulthood as a young actor, impressing critics as a teenage preacher in John Sayles’s 1987 epic, Matewan, before leaving “the repulsiveness of Hollywood”, and having a breakdown in his early 20s. To help, his older brother, Ned, suggested he start writing songs: 22 solo albums, more than 30 EPs, countless singles, and many collaborations have followed, some with friends from alternative and folk scenes, but also names such as Björk, Candi Staton and the National’s Bryce Dessner.

Interview-shy at the beginning of his career, Oldham’s image early on was almost mythological, gnomic (singer-songwriter Jeffrey Lewis captured his essence in 2005 track Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror, saying “if you look at indie-rock culture you really can’t ignore him”). His music arrived salted with flavours of folk, country and DIY experimentation, with tender, eloquent lyrics (many are in his beautiful 2018 anthology, Songs of Love and Horror). But his wide-ranging tastes have become clearer as he’s got older; he’s covered songs from Bruce Springsteen to Billie Eilish, Merle Haggard to Mariah Carey. He’s just read Carey’s memoirs, in fact, he tells me at our photoshoot: “Her book is really, really good – it’s with a ghostwriter, sure, but I was wonderfully shocked at her eloquence and the depth of self-perception”.

He dances, grins, and yawns playfully for our photographer and politely asks if he can play an old NTS Radio show on his phone. “I fucking love radio,” he says, later. “Momentarily loving the relationship of the DJ to that piece of music – I don’t need anything else.” His words can sound gentle and monastic in print, but in person, he’s a warm, welcoming presence. Sometimes serious, but always quietly disarming. Just like his music, in fact.

The Purple Bird is named after a childhood chalk drawing by Ferg. It hangs, framed in glass, in a room above Ferg’s garage, which serves as guest lodgings for close friends. “It says what school he was at, which is long closed and overgrown. Anyone who comes in this apartment is somebody he knows and trusts and appreciates on some level. He wants us to see it. It’s very charming.” Ferg organised Nashville-style writing sessions for Oldham with stars of bluegrass and country and brought in A-list session musicians. The results place Oldham in a timeless, country-warmed world. His voice, sometimes tender, sometimes frisky, carries songs about longing (Spend the Whole Night With You), infidelity (Boise, Idaho), and overcoming divisions: “No matter what side you’re standing on/ Can’t we all just get along,” swings the catchy opener, Turned to Dust (Rolling On).

There are other slyly political moments. Guns Are for Cowards is styled like a drinking song, buoyant with jaunty brass and accordion, while Downstream is about climate and pollution and came from an idea by John Anderson, one of Oldham’s singing heroes, “who is fairly conservative politically,” Oldham says. “And that’s what the spirit of this record is saying to me, how unfortunately and dishonestly divisive and ridiculous the political landscape is in the United States, because there we were – people of different ages and experiences – sitting there making music, having a ball.”

He picks up his phone on the table, in a cute, furry cover picked by his five-year-old daughter, Poppy. “We live in a world where these devices distort things so much.” Still, he wasn’t surprised when Trump was elected. “I don’t think I have room in my heart any more for surprise. I think the morning after [George W] Bush beat John Kerry [in 2004] I was genuinely surprised, but also I think a part of my heart withered and died at that moment. And to be honest, around three o’clock on election day [in November] I realised what was going to happen.” He hasn’t looked at a newspaper since.

His focus has turned local. Two weeks after the election, an explosion in a factory less than a mile from his house killed two people and injured a dozen. “It made me realise terrible things are happening in my neighbourhood that I should spend more time on rather than things over which I have absolutely no control.” Family life has strengthened that resolve. In 2016, he married textile artist Elsa Hansen, who walked up the aisle to a Merle Haggard covers band (“of which Ferg was a part”) and their daughter was born in 2019. His mother, Jo, was a teacher who made art quietly and passionately at home, but never showed it to anyone else. “She was distraught over this idea of who she was. I think she was probably like me.” Oldham was embarrassed to call himself an artist for years, even though he craved a “community of friends and family through music that felt absent elsewhere for whatever reason”.

Why was he embarrassed? “Because I kept thinking, why can’t I do something that’s real? It’s taken me a long time to understand that this is what I am, and more recently to start to become somewhat OK with it.”

The realisation has helped him bloom. When he’s told strangers on plane journeys and in casual conversations over the years that he makes music for a living, he’s noticed they’re “so vicariously uplifted by it”. He also realises now how powerful music is in the world, although the flipside of this is that big business knows too. “It’s how [Spotify’s] Daniel Ek can make billions of dollars. He knows people need music, and that when they access it, they’re at their most vulnerable. With music, we give ourselves up. It’s when we’re allowed to be ourselves.”

Music shouldn’t be dismissed as escapism, however, nor our discovery of it be driven by algorithms: “It’s doing it a disservice to think of it that way. It’s crucial and essential and sustaining.” For him, making music is “about feelings about love and friendship – about connections that I’ve made with people”. Not about songs on a screen, but in the studio, on the stage, existing in the heart and the soul. “It’s about that connection between a listener and music, which is something so valuable.” He smiles. “So valuable that I always want to feel it, to get there, too.”