MRG Live Presents: Bonnie "Prince" Billy

Bonnie "Prince" Billy is one of the many aliases singer and songwriter Will Oldham has used in his career in music, and it would become the most prolific, with Oldham releasing nearly all his material under the moniker from 1999 onward, the year he issued the breakthrough album I See a Darkness. Whether known as Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Palace, Palace Brothers, or Palace Songs, Oldham's music has consistently used the musical framework of vintage folk and country as a vehicle for his songs imagining the joys and failings of human nature. Depending on his mood, Oldham's voice can be clear or creaky (his best vocal work often appears on interpretive albums such as 2017's Best Troubador, 2018's Wolf of the Cosmos, and 2013's What the Brothers Sang, the latter a collaboration with Dawn McCarthy), and the arrangements may be full-bodied or spectral (the evolution from Palace Brothers' 1994 album Days in the Wake to 2001's Ease Down the Road and 2004's Bonnie "Prince" Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music is instructive), but the literacy and emotional power of his songs have been constant in his recorded work, and he's grown from being an interesting outlier in alt-country to a respected figure in folk and roots music circles.