Progressive Reviews | Daytrotter: 4

A Week With Bonnie Prince Billy's "Lie Down In The Light": Day 4

14 November 2008
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Words by Joel Minor // Illustration by Sonia Kreitzer

One month. That’s the advance word anybody got on a new Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy record hitting the streets, and word was about all it would remain until release date. No advance or review copies went out, and I suspect that was part of the strategy—to see if they could fly it in under the radar, or rather, under the wires of the Internet.

It was just like back in the day, not long ago at all, before one could download an album and preview it before buying it on release day. I was glad to only have the cover art and track listing to look at, and a rough demo of “So Everyone” to listen to, all courtesy of the Drag City website, a.k.a., “Lifeboat: Earth!” I knew of each of the last few albums months in advance and couldn’t resist the chance to warm up to them, mp3 style, in the meantime. Technology, the enemy of patience, took a little excitement away from official release day, and the record’s first spin at home.
I have to admit, I discovered Palace in Rolling Stone, who gave those early records very positive reviews, as did Spin, along with articles and Oldham interviews. In the mid-nineties, the big rags were ready and willing to do their part to promote Palace and get more records sold. Then the coverage disappeared, which I discovered was due to him not sending out review copies anymore, giving the proverbial finger to friendly critics and their privileged status of getting free music and advising others what to think about it ahead of time. I remember him saying in an interview that critics could seek out his music if they deemed it worthy, just like everyone else had to.

I couldn’t really blame him for the attitude, even though I had RS to thank for pointing me to Palace in the first place. After I became hooked on the music, calling up Drag City to order up everything Palace-related I could, I began to find out about other good, lesser-publicized music directly from the bands, labels and fans, and relied on the publishers of major mags for musical insights less and less. I not only couldn’t blame him, but I found it memorable and admirable for someone potentially about to hit the highway of popular-music fame to not pay the authorities’ tolls and instead stay on his own side path, where a bit more anonymity affords greater artistic control.

We didn’t get live previews of Lie Down’s songs either, having gone through a year-long dearth of shows and tours, something rare for the ‘Prince’ anymore. I doubt it’s for similar reasons to the time around Arise Therefore in 1996 when he expressed disdain for performing songs live, thinking people would get a lot more out of the music alone with the record than trying to hear in a noisy, crowded club. That was about the same time he was pulling back on standard self-promotion, not sending out review copies, pulling the Palace brand off the album cover.
Luckily that reluctance to put on vibrant and varied live shows didn’t last long, and countless have come since. He even goes out of his way to play the smaller places that most indie bands bypass. But the contrarian streak remained. Given the opportunity to open stadium shows for Bjork in the summer of 2003, he went out each night solo, accompanying himself with only an autoharp—an instrument he had just taught himself to play—in front of tens-of-thousands of perplexed and often hostile, spectacle-hungry people.

Bonny’s willfull and slightly misanthropic ways one hopes never goes away, and in “For Every Field There’s a Mole” they’re on display. Over strummed guitar and Lie Down’s ubiquitous bongos, both so easy-going, the king pontificates on the impossibility of failing. Lording over an obstacle-less, infinite space, he celebrates or at least relates to a chthonic creature, in blindness just as free as he. The song is confident and adamant, but also mournful and resigned, seeking to balance out the good and ill, but ending with the urge to stifle a choke with a throat-hold, to quiet crying through force.

The balancing aphorisms late in the song bring immediately to mind the well-known Ecclesiastes verses made famous by the Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn.” Perhaps less familiar to Western ears is canto 29 of the Tao Te Ching, which is about the futility of trying to change the world and includes a stanza of “there is a time for” this and “there is a time for” that. In fact, the whole Tao is a balancing act—advice not for hermits but for heads of states and families and anyone looking to live equitably and put power into perspective.

Bonny Billy has many solitary-man, king-of-his-own-kingdom songs in his oeuvre, some full of fright and dread, others fight and led. Songs like “Stable Will” (penned by Bryan Rich), “Tonight’s Decision (And Hereafter)” and “Sheep” are dark, brooding, bloody tales, while “Today I Was an Evil One,” “A King at Night” and “Grand Dark Feeling of Emptiness” take the horrific and turn it into the sanguine. Then there are “O Let It Be,” “Be Still and Know God” and “Patience,” true statements of obstinate individuality.

They all fit in their way with “For Every Field,” as do others similar, but I like the “gone and with no trace” of “A Minor Place” and the world he holds anointing him while he aches, to blend with the singing and sung, the bringing and brung. The exercise in equity comes to a climax in “Mole,” accentuated by a ragtime clarinet and gripping harmonies, by the desire to take command and exorcise regret. The same can be found in “Place,” of finding footing by accepting both help and harm as means to reign over one’s little realm, a realm of disappearance from either help or harm.

Bonny Billy’s kingdom exists in the darkness of night, space and sea depths, lovers his court, wolves and sharks his minions, scabs and bruises his medals. The sun, though, is the ultimate unconquered, the ultimate splendor and royalty to us here on earth, destroying and vivifying us at will, in turn, together. The death-to-afterlife transition, another prominent theme of Lie Down the album, emerges immediately in “Lie Down” the song, with the earth exposed to the sun’s destructive but welcoming rays.

The earth our bodies and the sun our center, inner divan of illumination and intelligence, each of our identities peeled, pulled from us, before we start it all again, such the clarifying end everybody accepts, except one time and again, who doesn’t show, doesn’t get sung, remains undone. His complaint? The end compassion for all lets fall the beloveds belonging to each another. What is this, sacrificing the sensual, the ultimate earthly love, for ethereal rejoinder, for the formless forgetting?

Lately, the warmth of the naked body, the warmth of the rumpled bed, been the savior of soul, allowing all others be drowned in tidal waves and floods, be buried in blizzards. God embodied in you, possessed by me, and vice-versa. However, lover has constant competition: the unreal me, my mirror self, and even you giving all of yourself can be not enough to prevent me escaping you into him. Will you take me back when I fall behind again, when I call you back again, when I find I can’t help love myself, can’t pretend to know heart’s ways, but can work to protect it from malevolence?

All “Lie Down in the Light” needs is the Maya Tone drum machine to match perfectly with another title song, “Arise, Therefore,” with its no end soon, faces pulled from us, rising and falling, waiting ahead and staying behind, and most importantly, its collective we and us. Wait, though, what about “O How I Enjoy the Light,” with its celebration of animalistic existence, and its loving and despising the light, which makes temporary all we earn, gain, and our temporizing ways?

Something makes me settle finally on “Three Questions,” though, the betrothed dividing the earth and some “praise to God” between them, inviting the ultimate vow of standing by the other through worldwide cataclysm and hostility, no matter how bad been or how many enemies made. This, to me, could very well be, the fundamental prayer alluded to, and perhaps too, it’s trying to know what can’t be known in advance of our release dates from earth, of the unforeseeable time to receive the light and let it all go.

Bonnie Prince Billy’s Daytrotter Session

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A Week With Bonnie Prince Billy's "Lie Down In The Light": Day 4

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