A Week With Bonnie Prince Billy's "Lie Down In The Light": Day 1
23 September 2008
tell your friends...
Words by Joel Minor // Illustration by Sonia Kreitzer
Earlier this year, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy released the live album, Wilding in the West. By the track listing you might have been fooled into thinking the CD included three new songs: “Little Small Song,” “Naked Lion” and “Magnificent Billy.” In reality, these were cut and pastes of familiar live songs and/or Bonny Billy banter, remixed (and I assume conceived by) Neil Michael Hagerty. In the case of “Little Small Song,” the one of the three that works best, I think, “Lost Blues” and “God’s Small Song” are sewn together seamlessly. As much as I enjoyed the rest of the album, part of me wanted to hear the whole thing like that. It seemed like an experiment with endless potential, and an experience I can definitely relate to.
Now that Lie Down in the Light is out, I’m in that familiar and fantastic stage of a new set of Bonny Billy songs lacing and looping around, first each other, then the many older ones already in my head, heart, step. The result, again, is inexhaustible results, ever intricate results. It’s not long for the songs to phase from unfamiliar to disbelieving they were never there before, promising to stay both recognizable and new. Not long for the intricacies to emerge, enlarging and enhancing the thematic world so easily emerged, so eagerly but unconsciously anticipated. Another estrangement ended.
You can hear it all over Wilding and practically any other live set over the past ten years especially—how much Bonny enjoys the performer-audience dynamic. He digs deep into his catalog, he gives out new arrangements of his standards, he presents an almost impossibly wide range of covers, all like he wants to offer his audience something new every time. It feels like he understands and appreciates the role of the listener, that as the writer and performer, once he writes them, once he performs them, they no longer belong only to him.
So, keeping in the spirit of Hagerty’s sonic melding of Bonny Billy’s live songs, I thought I’d celebrate the new studio album by similarly fusing each new song with an older one, based mostly on their similar topical threads. Lie Down in the Light is nothing if not philosophical in nature, after all, begging for its coherencies and contradictions within itself, as well as among its predecessors, to shine.
The last four albums especially, Bonny Billy has addressed romantic joys and travails with more directness. Master and Everyone and Superwolf were thoroughly infused with the break-up—longing for it, accepting it, regretting it. “You Want That Picture” stands out on Lie Down in this regard, as a call-and-response between a man and a woman, the former having left the latter, but both coming to the same conclusion: it’s all right.
When both parties are still taking umbrage, still dwelling on the other, what makes it all right? What reality can quell such emotion-based summations of two parted lovers? In short, their mortality, conceptualized individually and concluded identically. It’s the harshest, most equalizing concept that we forget as we hurt and let ourselves be hurt by others, even when we’re no longer around them. Relief will arrive when memory stops painting its self-serving, myopic pictures for us.
“Picture” is the most direct song (of the originals) on the album, offering no comfort except in existentialist enlightenment. Used to be, e.g., “You Will Miss Me,” “Stablemate,” “The Way,” there was a higher calling to the leaver, or, “Careless Love,” “His Hands,” “I Gave You,” a bitter bewilderment of the left. They are equalized here, in classic-country-duet fashion, that sways between hard-pounding guitar, and easy-going bongos and pedal steel.
My “Picture” remix partner is “Death to Everyone,” then—a swaggering homage to life’s impermanence and to the revelatory, corporeal pleasures thus possible. The hosing hedonism of “Death,” the relief of terrible things and grief, will mingle well with contemplating the sky, true that I cried, someday I’ll die, the guitar moaning like a distant locomotive. The death-to-all-there-is thought-train arrives. I am here, but not for long, rejoice.
“I know that missing you has just begun, there’s years to come.” So opens the most poignant song on the album, “Missing One,” and one of the most personal sounding that Bonny Billy’s ever done, based on the loss of his father as it seems to be. It’s another song about leaving and absence, but it’s breadth is boundless No one on earth has not faced or at least will not face the moment of having to go forward without the presence of a close companion or kin person. The grief we face, having to relive the loss unendingly, actually assists by opening our hearts to the sanctity of each fleeting moment, wherein love can flourish.
The gait is graceful, starting out soft and shuffling, pausing for a piano to step, sad but sure, before continuing the story of not even death having the power to take the missed one’s company, perhaps even in some way, making it more powerful than ever. As many songs as he has about absence, it’s been very rare for Bonny Billy to directly address the subject of someone else’s death. As a result, you can hear the uncertainty and range of emotion in his voice, until the end, when he joins the piano steps toward a confident conclusion.
For my amalgamate song I’m going back to the B-side of one of his first singles, “Trudy Dies”—the original, on the 7” or CD single—to get rowed away by the slow, steady strings. Again, the deceased is everywhere the narrator looks, yet here that’s not as much of a comfort, left alone, with no family to be supportive. He has to undo to get over who’s missed, rather than enact the absent one’s fulfillment by being himself.
No one done sad like Palace, but “Missing One” comes close. I can almost hear the down-trodden, guitar-being-tuned solo of “Trudy” awkwardly caressing the steady, cautiously optimistic, piano-chord stroll in the middle of “Missing One.” I let my own missed ones enter in, and even others, missing me. The singer both undone and fulfilled, the clouds become my arches and the flowers my face—the listener, the song’s reason being.
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