If you’ve never heard the name Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, or if you’ve heard the name but are less familiar with the man he represents, then there are at least three things you should know before you go see him at the Majestic tomorrow night:
1. He is a bonnie chap who sports a thick mustachio and sometimes even a beard to match. This has been his signature look throughout his over 20-year-long presence in the independent music world.
2. He is not actually a prince. He doesn’t even play one on TV, though before he even struck a chord on the guitar his young-man aspirations were in acting. Every so often you’ll see his face on screen, playing serious roles such as Kurt in Old Joy (2006), and not-so-serious roles (for reference, see: the alternate video for Kanye’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” and Chapter 15 of “Trapped in the Closet” by the venerable Robert Sylvester Kelly, aka R. Kelly).
3. He is a Billy, or, more formally, a Will. His name is Will Oldham. Oldham is the foreman of a factory full of musical stage personas, with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy being his most utilized and prolific persona to date. In the earlier stages of his career, Oldham released music under variations of ‘Palace’-named projects (e.g., Palace Brothers, Palace Music) and has since been producing music with a wide range of collaborators.
Despite all that is known about Oldham, he’s still a big question mark to his fans, new and old alike. Oldham represents a rare breed of musician who has managed to stay away from conventional over-reliance on social media as a means for marketing his music. He rarely does interviews, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any of his full-length albums on easy-access music sharing sites like Spotify. This kind of inaccessibility combined with his ability to constantly surprise (eau de Oldham anyone?) nudges his fan base to stay active in their quest to find the answer to the question: “Who is Will Oldham?”
Perhaps the most important bit of information to note in anticipation of his show is that “An Evening with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy” alone is an exceedingly rare thing to come by. Given his collaborative approach to music, Oldham most often performs with a backing band. For his recent full-length album, however — aptly titled Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy — Oldham relieved his collaborators of musical duty to focus on creating an album that was, from its inception to its distribution, almost entirely a self-directed endeavor. Maybe this upcoming show will finally be our chance to form a notion of what Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy really means as a standalone musical project to the man behind the name and the face whiskers. If we know Oldham for anything, though, we know we’ll be left with more questions than answers.