Sorry to disappoint you: this is not a collection of slash fiction starring The Prince of Alt Country, but it is a tour through his more erotic moments that reveals them inseparable from his soul-searching, even soul-lifting moments.

The Erotic Visions of Will Oldham

Well, how would you put it? Oldham’s a sensualist, and a Lothario, if you look at all the personae across the songs… not to mention the anatomical details, the lack of coyness when it comes to oral sex, and the odd bit of probing at other orifices. Still, there are few songs about sex that aren’t also Visions – in his classic single, ‘Ohio River Boat Song’, Katerina isn’t just the most beautiful girl in the county, she somehow IS the whole county; eroticized, and imbued with beauty for raising her… or at the very least, being seen by an amorous Oldham. So far, so romantic – classical, even – but Oldham would soon push toward the mystic, as we shall see:

When it's time from work to go, and in my boat I row,
'cross the muddy Ohio,
when the evening light is falling,
and I look towards Floyd's Knobs,
where the afterglories glow
And I dream on two bright eyes, with a merry mouth below

She's my beauteous Katerina, she's my joy and sorrow too
Though I know she is untrue,
Oh, but I cannot live without her
For my heart's a boat in tow and I'd give the world to know
If she means to let me go
As I sing the whole day through

Katerina, your lovely hair has more beauty, I declare
Than all the tresses fair
from Smoke Town to Oldham County
Be it black, red, gold, or brown, let them hang to lengths below
They mean not as much to me as a melting flake of snow

And her dance is like a gleam
of the sunlight on the stream
And the screeching blue jays seem
to form her name when screaming
But my heart is full of woe, for last night she made me go
And tears begin to flow as I sing the whole day through

A few years later, Joya (1997) is filled with much darker visions. The album title puns on “jewels” (i.e. balls), at the same time suggesting just how precious happiness might be. One of the two songs on the album with an explicit drugs reference, ‘Rider’, eroticizes the whole universe, as Oldham closes his eyes on a scene that could be erotic… or oddly vampiric:

High, high all night now
My eyes bugged out, and I’m down on the couch
Lady’s got a box pressed into my face
And a belt of beads draped around her waist

I flex my neck and lose my sight
See the stars dropping out alright
Clouds and nebulae making noises
And constellations in erotic poises

Cold in space and fingers long
Between the ears a synapse is wrong
Clicked apart and it’s all it can be
The last, the last you’ll see of me

Oldham doesn’t often leave any clues that the Visions in his songs might be trips, or even dreams – nor that his brain chemistry might be frazzled (“between the ears a synapse is wrong”), which is delivered in a way that’s tremendously saddening in its pragmatic view of his own suffering… even while it suggests that mis-wiring might be contribute to his rare talent. There’s an echo of the song – or a re-appearance of Oldham’s “Lady” – on ‘Under What Was’ (track 4), in the lines “You can lay me out a place / It’s time I had some love / Have the ladies gather round / And do me from above”. Is this supposed to be sensual, though? Oldham’s ambivalent about women throughout the album. Sometimes the woman in a song is more of a succubus than a temptress, and in ‘I Am Still What I Meant To Be’ (track 10), women’s bodies take on the most sinister and disturbing aspect, among the other images assailing him in his delirium:

[…]

Crowded the hall with stock women parts
Candles were lit, burdened the hearts
Felt a bad vibe kick in just then
Things seemed to smolder, enclosing us in

I am still what I meant to be
And I’m losing my mind
But our burdens must lessen
And our enemies die

In these lines, the supposedly unaffected, un-masked “Will Oldham” foreshadows many of the bleakest lines he would sing on I See a Darkness (1998), as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. How did he get here? How did the self-pity of a poetic (but possibly frivolous) young lover, singing to his “beauteous Katerina”, turn to a living nightmare, in which bodies are no longer inviting, but “stock women parts”?

Heading back to the beginning, the debut album, There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You (1993), has plenty of stunning moments – the bango-twangling opener, ‘Idle Hands Are the Devil’s Plaything’, which seems to tumble through the earth, past “those who let their selves get the best of them”, right through the circles of Hell; the genuinely sinister Gothic duet with Paul Greenlaw on the title track, which sounds like the spirits from Twin Peaks discussing who to possess; and everybody’s favourite song about incest, ‘Riding’ (as in “where you going riding, boy?”). For all the flashes of genius in the weird imagery and phrasing across the album, the most elaborate song is also one of the most intelligible. Effectively, Oldham is using the idea of “the country”, hillbilly culture, and Country music as a kind of primitivism, to reach for the repressed, the sinful… but also the true impulses. This is ‘Long Before’ –

Long before what is black was blackened
Oh, oh, long before
Blooms of gray made mother lovely
Mother ain't lovely no more
And long before the house was leaning
Oh, oh, long before
Corridor of box woods lined the entrance
Box… woods ain't here no more
[…]
Long before you were an artwork
Mama suckled you on her holy breast
Mama's breast ain't holy no more
Long before we shared a shortsheet
Oh, oh, long before
I stood above you as you slept
I… don't stand above no more
We’ve one little mobile
And one filthy path
And will drift along tongueless, unhappiness at last
At last
At last…
’til we see fit to stand before
That virgin c--t, that sainted whore
Whose piss we have slept under
Whose smell we have bore
It is her heelprint that marks our faces
Oh, oh, long before

Okay, so the Madonna-Whore dichotomy (or dialectic) isn’t exactly unknown (Hey, Madonna Ciccone has certainly heard of it), but unlike a PC-generation, Oldham wallows in his less palatable feelings, and lets you feel the betrayal of a child realizing “Mama” is mortal, material, piss and milk. Is this sexist… or sympathetic to the child’s sense of loss in the song? No-one says the child can’t get past the dichotomy, to see Woman-as-Woman… and the listener can’t either, for being repulsed by the crudeness of the opposition. This is just the one song, though, and Oldham would complicate the picture of morality (beyond undergrad psychology) with a more idiosyncratic set of sins. This is (the end of) everyone’s favourite, ‘Riding’ –

…who you gonna ride with, boy?
I'm gonna bring my sister Lisa
Who you gonna ride with, boy?
I'm gonna bring my sister Lisa
Who you gonna ride with, boy?
All dressed up and with that look of joy
Who you gonna ride with, boy?
I'm gonna bring my sister Lisa
Because I love my sister Lisa
I love my sister Lisa
I love my sister Lisa most of all
Don't you know that that's sinful, boy
God is what I make of Him
God is what I make of Him
I'm long since dead and I live in Hell
She's the only girl that I love well
We were raised together and together we fell
God is what I make of Him
And all I have I give to Him
All I own I owe to Him
All my life I pledge to Him

Back when I brought a shiny new copy of the LP home to a flat full of Slint fans, this seemed hilarious, and instantly spawned a tribute band, Pastor Paul and the Love-Pedlars. In retrospect, though, not many people would have kept listening if Will Oldham was wholly ironic, and the sincerity of the conclusion to ‘Riding’ – taking the hard path of service to a higher cause, and making your own god, rather than staying within a safe community, obeying received laws – makes it one of those many moments across Oldham’s albums that keeps you listening close, for those unexpected insights he occasionally comes across.

Days in the Wake & Hope (1994)

Oldham’s next two releases Days in the Wake and the Hope EP (both 1994) would be sparse, whimsical affairs, taking a cue from songs like ‘I Was Drunk at the Pulpit’ or ‘Idle Hands’. There’s a lot of tenderness too, and plenty of visionary moments where the world seems alive (on ‘All Is Grace’: “The blessed grace of waking up / of breathing in the sheets / and hello to you at the window / hello to you…”), even if there are few extended visions. (Personally, I like the fact you don’t know who’s at the window: the prosaic interpretation would be that he means his lover, but the delivery is so thin and cute, he might be talking to a cartoon squirrel or bluebird, looking in.) Arguably, Oldham was pushing towards a minimalism desperately lacking in contemporary music – the very opposite of the pumped-up melodrama of grunge and pop alike – a more truthful expression of the fleeting nature of beauty, and hope for the near-hopeless. Sure, this metaphysical finagling shouldn’t disguise the fact that the songs mostly have sexual subtexts – many of the lovers (or just the characters) in the most cryptic songs disappear in the morning – but there’s a world beyond them that offers some consolation, and a subtly religious language framing their visions.

Even if none of the songs is as elaborate as ‘The Lion Lair’ (from Ease Down the Road), the strangeness of Will Oldham’s erotic vision is apparent across the early albums – the way he (or a song’s persona) can go so quickly from baby-talking naif (“It’s a dream to really be here with you / one in the morning, just going on two / with nothing to do but just snuggle and coo”) to sexual stallion (“If you could stay on the wild kicking horse / I could handle your presence beside me”) in ‘All Gone’. Not quite an “erotic vision”, ‘I Send My Love to You’ (from Days in the Wake) lists the whole world that Oldham would send to his lover – again, prosaically, he may just mean “…in the form of songs”, but there’s some gentle surrealism in the fact he never says that; instead: “I send my trees to you / I send my pleas to you: won’t you send some back”. In the second verse, he’s gone cartoon-crazy, missing his lover: “The moon is falling / my wounds are calling / my head is bleeding / and I’m a duck. / The lake is cracking / It hears me quacking / “Fuck the land and two, if by me!” One of the most repetitious songs on the album seems to be in a similar vein, but listen close and ‘Meaulnes’ (named for Alain Fournier’s classic novel about a sexual utopia glimpsed in childhood, by the narrator) is more like Oldham’s own ‘It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ –

And he came by the way that he walked x 4
And he came by the way of a half million murders
And he came by the way of a long list of ironies
And he came by the way of the road to Sioux City
And he came by the way of the halfbreeds and lesbians

And he thought it was in there but still wasn’t happy
He knew that it was less than the way that it could be
And undaunted, un-eager, unshaven, in britches
He set out again to unveil the earth’s riches…
And he came by the way that he walked x 4

Neat how the initial repetition makes you feel the length of the journey (this is what most “walking blues” do), and then how the arrangement in lines make you imagine the ‘halfbreeds and lesbians’ having their own county or island… like the Cyclops or Circe. At the end, our erotic adventurer is off to find happiness, and in the best tradition of allegory, it’s double-sensed: he’s looking for a sexual apocalypse (“…to unveil the earth’s riches”), which doesn’t make Oldham less important than Dylan, for being apolitical, and maybe makes him more honest; after all, we’re driven by what we lack, revolutionaries or rogues alike, and Oldham shows it.

Viva Last Blues (1995)

By the time of Viva Last Blues (1995), Oldham had recruited a band to make a more rocking sound… albeit as rocking as Neil Young on After the Goldrush (1970) or Harvest (1972). One of the most nakedly joyful songs on the album, ‘New Partner’, echoes ‘Riding’ with its erotic moments followed by soul-deep guilt, but creates a new character – or a new sentiment – by referring to a terrible solitude the singer’s leaving behind, as the song’s final chorus rises up, with an optimistic church organ playing, and a guitar break that’s about as close to “Yay!” as a guitar can get:

There's a black tinted sunset with the prettiest of skies
lay back, lay back, rest your head on my thighs
There is some awful action that just breathes from my hand
just breaths from a deed so exquisitely grand

And you are always on my mind x4

[…]

Now the sun's fading faster, we're ready to go
there's a skirt in the bedroom that's pleasantly low
And the loons on the moor, the fish in the flow
And my friends, my friends still will whisper hello
We all know what we know, it's a hard swath to mow
when you think like a hermit you forget what you know
And you are always on my mind x4
I've got a new partner, riding with me x3
I've got a new partner now

Unlike a thousand pop-songs that filch the lines of classic hits, and cheapen themselves doing so, Oldham’s echoing of Elvis Presley with “you are always on my mind” has an enhanced fragility and humanity for inviting the comparison to the King’s deep sensuality. For anyone still under the misapprehension that Oldham tends to objectify women, or categorize them unrealistically, check out ‘We All, Us Three, Will Ride’ where he sings in a woman’s hopeful voice – expecting her lover to return, give her a child, and bear her away, heroically – as a songwriter, he gives her the same vision as any of his male personae (“The hills have eyes / and the trees have lives…”); that’s to say, the same capacity to re-make the world through her visions.

Later, on the same album, there are stronger hints that Oldham’s “black feelings” may not be as easily, or permanently remedied as ‘New Partner’ would suggest, and the result of simple guilt or adversity, but some wrong wiring. ‘Old Jerusalem’ opens with the tautologous – deliberately confused – “trouble has caused me so much grief” and then shows the protagonist collapsing until an unnamed woman comes who somehow “hold[s] wide the ceiling of [his] darkened path” and when they do sleep together, it’s a similarly transformative, healing, almost mystical experience:

The whole thing shatters and I scream out your name
And you come running
Oh, it is always the same

Time passes and the room goes dark
I expect to see your figure standing naked over me
With a mole on your neck and a wry way of holding
Wide the ceiling of my darkened path

Then we mingle our limbs, and I hear all calling
We swim and we buckle, and I emote
It is the only time to catch it
So we may as well rest… and let it go

We're gonna be rejoined
And the children will love it
All my brothers and my sisters resting holy above it
Let us wallow, let us play, this is our god's day (solo)
Let us wallow, let us play, this is our god's day (chorused)

For all the emphasis on erotic visions in this flit through Oldham’s back catalogue, Viva Last Blues (1995) frequently alludes to the need to love your brothers – your fellow men – as much as your literal, biological brothers (i.e. Ned and Paul Oldham), who are (implicitly) there for you when these women move on, for whatever reasons. If you listen closely, there’s always a subtle coding in the arrangement of backing vocals – the points in each song where Oldham’s accompanied… or unaccompanied, by voices sometimes muted (whispering dark thoughts) or flat and almost inhuman, overwhelming him.

The metronomically lifeless and stark Arise, Therefore (1996) would follow Oldham’s country-blues, with a weird (and broken) cast of characters, some straight out of Deliverance (“you hold his arms… I’ll f--k him / f--k him with… something”), but not so much in the way of erotic visions. In fact, ‘You Have Cum in Your Hair, and Your Dick Is Hanging Out’ almost sounds like a refutation of Oldham’s former romanticism. With its primitive drum-machines, leaden piano-chords, and icicle-clean guitars, the album’s massively indebted to the sound of Smog (Bill Callahan’s thanked in the credits), but songs like ‘Kid of Harith’ may remind you of Papa M’s Live from a Sharkcage or the first half of Mogwai’s Come on Die Young (both 1999). As we’ve seen, the next album Joya (1997) would enact a continual struggle for optimism, culminating in I See a Darkness (1998), before the second half of Oldham’s career could truly begin… characterized by an abundance of female vocals, duets, and more buoyant humour. Ideally, this glance at just one of Oldham’s themes should show how inter-related all his themes and identities are – how he’s much less of a shape-shifter than we think. His visions don’t necessarily take him out of the darkness for good, and they often fill it with even more sinister shapes, but sometimes the capacity for vision points the direction out of it, for the listener.

DISCOGRAPHY:

PALACE BROTHERS: There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You (1993)

One of the defining, and most-often emulated, Alt Country albums. Too flimsy in places to love wholeheartedly, but an impressive exploration of country iconography as a means to re-discover emotions seemingly unknown to the apathetic slacker-generation of the 90s, and perhaps the meaning of Sin, too.

PALACE BROTHERS: Days in the Wake (1994)

A minimal affair whose cuteness seems throwaway, but proves endearing.

PALACE SONGS: Hope (1994)

Languid and a little too drifting for the most part, but worth a listen just for the heartbreakingly precious ‘Christmastime in the Mountains’

PALACE MUSIC: Viva Last Blues (1995)

Perhaps the most appealing of the early albums, the more “rock” piano lines, and Jason Loewenstein’s drumming gave the Palace sound a new edge.

PALACE MUSIC: Arise Therefore (1996)

An album that sounds like it’s on a life-support machine… even for Smog fans. Some fine songs, but a gruelling whole, and the least appealing by far.

WILL OLDHAM: Joya (1997)

Even on the slow songs, Oldham’s intent becomes clearer – setting up a moment of epiphany. Some lively numbers, though, and a masterful ending (‘Idea and Deed’) that could be the best thing Oldham's ever done

PALACE MUSIC: Lost Blues, Singles & B-Sides

A pretty good introduction to Palace, in spite of the defeatism suggested by ‘Lost Blues’. All sides of Oldham are on show here, and it works as an album

WILL OLDHAM: Black / Rich Music & Ode Music

A pair of EPs sold on tour, and with limited edition albums. Completists only.

WILL OLDHAM: Guarapero: Lost Blues 2 (2000)

Sadly, not nearly as enjoyable as its predecessor.

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