Will Oldham covers MC's CTTA
There's a haunting air of brokenhearted, late-night/early-morning desolation to Will Oldham's latest recording as Bonnie "Prince" Billy that, combined with a cover photo of a bearded Oldham looking like a backwoods killer and/or preacher, doesn't much suggest the kind of guy who would talk enthusiastically of covering Mariah Carey. But Bonnie "Prince" Billy - or Oldham or Palace - is nothing if not a complex individual.
And so it came to pass that the bearded face behind a record sad enough to make Beck's "Sea Change" sound like "Where It's At Revisited" should find himself cutting a cover of "Can't Take That Away (Mariah's Theme)" with the formerly local Ian Williams of Storm and Stress/Don Caballero fame on R&B guitar at the apartment studio of Buddah Monk (who, Oldham notes, is known for his Ol' Dirty Bastard productions). "It comes from the record Rainbow," he says of the song. "And it sort of outlines her personal philosophy on everything - or on how to get by day to day."
They recorded the cut for a compilation of, as Oldham puts it, "music people have a low opinion of". Not Oldham, though. "I like Mariah Carey, some of her music, a lot," he says. As to whether his version is closer to one of his own releases or Carey's original, Oldham answers, "Neither. It has an intro that sounds like it could come off Like A Prayer and then, as it gets into it, it sounds like low-rent basement R&B. It doesn't really sound like one of her records, because her records are definitely pretty high-rent. But we were working in Buddah Monk's apartment studio, sort of in the hood in Brooklyn."
Oldham doesn't know if that particular release will ever see the light of day, but he's about to bring some darkness to your day with the heartbreaking "Master and Everyone", a skeletal recording that captures the feeling of being alone in the world with no one but yourself to blame. It wasn't his intention, Oldham says, to make such a skeletal record. "I'd scheduled a bunch of musicians to come in from different parts of the world and started working on the record that way," he says. "And it just wasn't coming together. So we stripped it down to just myself and my brother [Ned] and a drummer, and then fired the drummer and finished the record like that, and then just had people come in and do some overdubs. So it just sort of developed over the course of recording."
The sparse production only makes the music that much sadder, leading a number of early reviews to label the record darker than 2001's "Ease Down the Road" while Oldham says the opposite is true. "If you just saw the lyrics on a page," he says, "this record would seem a lot lighter than the last one. And the reason would probably be that the last record is the sound of 11 people who are mutually respectful of each other's musical abilities as well as of each other's friendship coming together and making a record. And this one is the sound of two people out of desperation playing the songs by themselves."
Which the songs may, in fact, have demanded. "I figured that's probably why it happened," he says. "But it was never thought about like that. It was just like '[Expletive], this doesn't work. Let's just do it like this cause we can't mess it up with just two people.' " Oldham was planning on touring alone, but he's out on the road with a rotating cast of musicians.
"There'll be sort of a band in Pittsburgh," he says of his Monday night stop at the Rex on the South Side. "We'll have different people different nights, but in Pittsburgh, there's gonna be probably four or five of us. I was gonna do all the shows by myself and then we did that show in Baltimore and it was such a pleasure that I asked the musicians that I played with there if they wanted to come on these shows and do what we did before. And they were into it, but nobody could do it for the whole time. So there's different people coming in and out."
As to whether the show will focus on "Master and Everyone", Oldham says, "Hopefully, it'll focus on the show. But yeah, there will be a bunch of songs from the record. I think we'll probably play the whole record, but then play other songs as well." Including Palace Songs? "It might go far back," Oldham says. "The record is 10 songs in 30-odd minutes, so we'll probably play two or three times that long." (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) Many thanks to Monarc MC.
|
