Bonnie Prince Billy

With his cracked, melancholy warble and stark, plaintive lullabies, William Oldham is well established as a cult, world-weary songwriter who flits from dark, sombre frailty to gentle, touching sweetness amid pure eccentricity and random comedy. Born in Kentucky, he started out as an actor and featured in the Academy Award-nominated drama 'Matewan' in 1987, before making his first recordings with the band Palace Brothers with members of Louisville indie rockers Slint in the early 1990s. Taking the Bonnie Prince Billy moniker as a helpful way of adopting a character when he performed, he really found his feet and framed himself as a peculiar, lo-fi, alternative country crooner on 'I See a Darkness' in 1998. The album's title track was later covered by Johnny Cash and Bonnie Prince Billy became the critic's darling and hero of music fans with follow-ups 'Ease Down the Road' and 'Master and Everyone' offering an odd intimacy that made him really unique. Among his prolific output his most acclaimed albums include 'The Letting Go', recorded in Reykjavik with Icelandic producer Valgeir Siggurdsson, the Nashville country jam 'Beware', and the rootsy, stripped-down Americana of 'Lie Down in the Light'. Along the way he has also collaborated with Tortoise, Bill Callahan, Trembling Bells, Angel Olsen and Matt Sweeney and acted in a handful of movies, including 'New Jerusalem', 'Wendy and Lucy' and 'A Ghost Story'. In 2017 he covered a collection of songs by the late country legend Merle Haggard on the album 'Best Troubadour'.

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