The Trees & Flowers & Creeks & Rocks Hold Your Face With Every Season
On Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Perfect Funeral Songs & Parties In The Graveyard
Back in my stoner days, I once drove to Melbourne with my buddy Nige and a stack of ten Will Oldham/Palace Music/Bonnie ‘Prince’Billy CDs and we just hung off every word of every song and lit up a fresh joint each time we changed albums and exchanged barely a word between us as we eased down the road (pun intended, IYKYK) for the whole nine hour drive.
It was a wondrous excursion into the cosmic joys of where a song can take you if you really let it.
The human race has become pretty adept at finding solutions for our problems. When our bodies break down, we go to a doctor. We turn to plumbers when we want to fix leaky taps and mechanics when something goes wrong with our cars. But when something goes wrong with our hearts or we're grieving or lost or feel alone, we tend to turn to more mysterious places like songs. Lyrics and melodies that resonate can provide comfort and lift us up when nothing else works.
The countless, timeless songs of Will Oldham, who also represents Bonnie Prince Billy, have helped many of us make some kind of sense of life, love, death and other swirling matters of the soul and the universe, while holding out a metaphysical hand along the way. Songs from the pen of Will Oldham are truly a wild and wonderful thing - and have also been a source of great comfort and wisdom, for me and many others - if you haven’t heard them before, get in there here! And you’re welcome.
We’ve crossed paths a few times (to my absolute thrill he showed up towards the end of an epic Slow Hand show once (my early 2000s band) - barefoot in denim cut offs - at the Greyhound Hotel in St. Kilda, Melbourne; a down to earth venue popular with bikers, strippers and junkies that was always a great place to gig!) but we don’t really know each other, so I was also thrilled when he agreed to record a conversation with me for Death is Not the End, and I’m super happy to be able to share that with you today.
Listen HERE direct or here on APPLE Podcasts.
Will was as wonderful to talk to as his songs are to listen to, and we talked our way through how music can help us process and explore death, the challenges of dementia, funeral songs, tribute albums, conducting Johnny Cash, strange dreams, collaborating with David Ferguson, Cowboy Jack Clement, parties in the graveyard and more…
One of Will’s favourite ‘funeral songs’ is ‘Cycles’ by Gayle Caldwell, with the lovely lyric Life is like the seasons, After winter comes the spring, So I'll keep this smile awhile, And see what tomorrow brings that he first discovered on a Frank Sinatra album as a kid and eventually recorded his own version.
If you haven’t noticed, all the episodes of this podcast so far have been inspired by a song title, but the title of this episode, ‘The Trees & Flowers & Creeks & Rocks Hold Your Face With Every Season’, is a lyric taken from the 2008 Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy song ‘Missing One’, written after the death of his father, that just kept resonating. Listen for yourself and I think you’ll see what I mean…
I have also been returning over and over to this song ‘Boats To Build’ from David Ferguson’s album ‘Nashville No More’, that Will calls ‘the perfect funeral song’. Will directed the videoclip and shares some great stories about Ferg and Johnny Cash and Ferg’s mentor, the country outlaw Cowboy Jack Clement. I’ve recorded with Ferg in Nashville a few times now and can attest he is a true force of nature - fun fact, he also composed the iconic music for Red Dead Redemption without having any idea what an Xbox game was!
Here’s the links to listen again: HERE direct or here on APPLE Podcasts. If you enjoy, please do leave a little review or just rate it, it really helps get the show out there.
I’m going to leave you with a song from the latest Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy record The Purple Bird, produced by David Ferguson - it was recorded long after our conversation but its one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard about being human and I just had to share it.
One of the things Will said in our conversation was ‘Death doesn't belong to the dead. Death belongs to the living.’ which I feel is true - so what I take away from that it’s up to us to find the best ways to explore and process it and celebrate our very existence.
Fill your days with love and music… and may we all keep rolling on,
Lo x
Wish I knew you in our stoner days, Lo! I'd like to mention that the song "Boats to Build" is the title song of the 1992 album by the greatest of all singer-songwriters on the Texas-Nashville axis, Guy Clark. And I'm not sure what was meant by Will Oldham when he called it "the perfect funeral song." I can't think of a song more full of life, adventure, and hope. Listen to Guy's version.