I don’t really care if you spend your life illegally downloading
music. Go ahead and torrent your days away, bit by bit. Fine by me. But when Will Oldham, aka Bonnie
“Prince” Billy, aka the latest Audio Paranoid Skitz, ruins advance copies of
his new album – just for the sake of circumventing all you pirates out there – I’m a bitter
man.

Imagine pushing play on the first song (”Beware Your Only Friend”) and suddenly around 40
seconds in you hear this….

And then two minutes later, you hear this….

And on and on and on, every couple of minutes, making for an
awesome hi-fi listening experience every music critic should cherish.

Not that I wasn’t warned. A giant sticker on the CD read, “The
dropouts are real – your ability to copy them is not.”

But what about my ability to listen to the music?

I mean, does
anyone really make money off records anymore? Not long after they profiled the
hell out of Oldham, The New Yorker turned its
lens on Lily Allen. The kicker at the end of the story was her teasing fans at a concert for singing along to songs that weren’t even released yet.

“It’s alright — I don’t make money off those anyways,” she said.

(I know, nothing like a Lily Allen reference in a Will
Oldham blog – that’s how bitter I am).

So before ol’ Louisville Bill drops in at the Orchard
Spotlight Sunday night (a Guiness Book of World Record – the only musician ever
in the history of man to play the Orchard one night and the Fillmore the next),
I would like to take this moment to say what a freaking awesome album it is, especially
the little ditty called “Without Work, You Have Nothing,” but I can’t
concentrate on a note long enough before some white dude impersonating an Indian butts
in to tell me this….

Or maybe I’m just jaded. I should have started the blog this way:

The grittiest of American singer-songwriters – Bob Dylan, Leonard
Cohen, Tom Waits, Merle Haggard – are masters of inhabiting characters. Out of
lyrics and chords, they invent the role and then play it through, projecting
cinema from sound.

Will Oldham is no
different.

Consider his first major role: More than 20 years ago, while
casting the movie “Matewan,” director John Sayles was having trouble finding
the right actor to play a kid prodigy preacher in a desolate film about a
miner’s revolt in West Virginia.

At New York
casting calls, none of the teen actors could pull off the grit, much less the
accent. Acting on a tip, Sayles brought in a gangly 17-year-old kid raised on
theater in Louisville.

“He had a bit of Kentucky
in his voice that broke now and then like Jimmy Stewart’s,” Sayles
remembers in his book “Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan.” “He
read the first sermon and it wasn’t bad at all. I asked him to read it again and
make it a little less text-bound and a little more just like a guy telling us a
story, and bang, there it was in the reading.”

Forty albums later, that “bang” still hits you in the gut. When
he drops by Sunday to play a rare show at the Orchard Spotlight converted
church in downtown Santa Rosa (a night before he holds forth at the Fillmore in
San Francisco), Oldham brings along his invented musical sidekick Bonnie
“Prince” Billy and the new album “Beware” that came out earlier this month….blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah….

Oh yeah, the Orchard show is sold out, but this dude has a ticket…..