Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - The Letting Go

Very few artists are day-one purchases for me these days. My favorites I usually buy within a week or two, sometimes discoveries take months to make. But Will Oldham (aka Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, aka Palace Music) has become a hot-off-the-presses pickup for me, one of the best songwriters of this generation and certainly one of the most eccentric. His last two albums proper - Master And Everyone and Superwolf - are among this decade's best.

I just got back from Tunes and am only listening to The Letting Go for the first time, so I won't make any comparisons yet, except to say that this one's lighter in tone than those other two (though that's not saying much). Right now, a song called No Bad News is on and it freaking rules, man. It's about being the bearer of, you guessed it, bad news. Dawn McCarthy's vocals are great, too, really helping to bring haunting beauty to these songs along with the guitars and orchestration. See Love Comes to Me, Then the Letting Go, Strange Form of Life, etc.

And apparently the mututal fascination between Bjork and Oldham hasn't died, as, to go along with their collaboration on Drawing Restraint 9 and her standing on the side of the stage at Keyspan Park almost droooling on herself as he played - this album was recorded in Reykjavik.

And Bonnie made it all worth buying the physical CD:



Released: Today. BUT OF COURSE.

Like the Yo La, the first video isn't from the new album. It's from Superwolf. And if you haven't seen it yet, you've missed out. The second is from the new one.