I saw the tour that supported this next album last year, but didn’t have the record yet and so I couldn’t review it at that time. However, if you also want to hear about the show it is at the bottom of an Abbie Gardner review. Read it at Disc 1641.
Disc 1769 is…Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You
Artist: Bonnie Prince Billy
Year of Release: 2023
What’s up with the Cover? Looks like a restaurant. As album covers go this one doesn’t inspire me so much as make me hungry. Good thing I’m headed out for brunch after I post this.
How I Came To Know It: I already liked Bonnie Prince Billy so this was me buying his latest record. I’d also heard a few of the songs live, as noted above.
How It Stacks Up: Counting his two collaborations with Matt Sweeney (which I do) but not counting his compilation of Greatest Palace Music (which I love, but don’t count for stacking) I have seven Bonnie Prince Billy albums. This amounts to about a third of his records. Of those seven (if you just said, ‘which seven?’ please try to keep up) I put “Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You in at #4, which is respectable.
Ratings: 3 stars but almost 4
I didn’t always know what Bonnie Prince Billy (aka Will Oldham) was talking about on “Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You” but he definitely wasn’t keeping secrets. The album is raw and fragile and unafraid to show the inner workings of the human heart, in all its wonder and weirdness.
If you’re not familiar with Bonnie Prince Billy, he is a folk singer who looks like a drifter, but sings with a gentle, wispy head voice making you feel like you’re in the presence of an angel. The angel is sometimes soothing and reassuring and sometimes more of a blood and thunder apocalypse, but in either incarnation you’ll feel privileged that he’s willing to share this curious mix of inspiration and uncertainty with us mere mortals. I’m told angels don’t usually open up like that.
“Keeping Secrets…” starts out strong, and “Like It Or Not” is one of my favourite Bonnie Prince Billy songs on this or any of his albums. It opens with:
“Everyone walks to a certain point then turns around;
how far you go just depends on the time that you got.
Time is a killer like its good buddies love, light and sound.
There’s not enough room for us both here, like it or not.
Everyone smiles when they see something rendered with justice.
Everyone laughs to dispel something bound up inside.
Everyone cries when we feel like nobody trusts us.
Everyone dies in the end so there’s nothing to hide.”
I had originally intended to just quote the first two lines, but like so many of BPB’s songs, the image continues to unwind itself in your mind, and it is hard to stop once you start paying attention.
While this is the album’s best example, other songs (“Kentucky is Water”, “Willow, Pine and Oak”) are also dripping with rich imagery. This imagery doesn’t always provide you an immediately accessible narrative to follow, so much as concepts to ponder. This, plus his application of religious imagery, makes “Keeping Secrets…” a bit like listening to a street preacher or new age prophet. It all feels like wisdom, but it’s a wisdom that requires contemplation before it reveals its secrets to you.
“Willow, Pine, and Oak” is the most straightforward of the bunch as BPB sketches character studies of three kinds of people, each rendered through comparison to a kind of tree. BPB prefers “Oak People” and I could quote him as to why, but this review would quickly become a quote fest, so I just encourage you to go and listen yourself.
BPB is not just a gentle and wise preacher, he is also a delightful kook and “Keeping Secrets…” has its fair share of the weird and wonderful. He follows up “Willow, Pine and Oak” with “Trees of Hell” which is a horror story about how trees animate and start taking revenge for humanity’s use of them. The tale ends with our narrator being disemboweled and blinded by branches, which is even creepier when juxtaposed against BPB’s angelic vocal.
“Bananas” is a song about sex where the banana is a metaphor for exactly what a banana usually implies in such situations. The song is a bit too weird for me to love, but I always admire how BPB will unapologetically talk about all the sticky parts of sexual encounters.
The production on this record is very stripped down, which is how I like it, and is mostly just the Bonnie Prince and his acoustic guitar, with occasional additions of strings or horn to add colour and variation.
Overall, the record is uneven, with about a third of it being some of the best songs BPB has ever written, and a lot of the others being just OK. Hence the three stars, but it was a thoughtful and enjoyable three-star journey, and I recommend it.
Best tracks: Like It Or Not, Behold Be Held!, Kentucky is Water, Willow Pine and Oak
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