Palace Music
Arise Therefore

A single face for many names, like all the half-baked egocentrics who first chatter about themselves and then regret it. Whether he calls himself Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Bonnie Billy, Palace Music, Palace Brothers, Palace or Palace Songs, Will Oldham, or no name at all, the common denominator is and always remains the same, namely: a hastily taken self-timer photo where he is the center of everything with the world as a backdrop, muted and consequently narrated through the protagonist's reflection and shadows. 

It is his style to sprinkle his music with "I" and "My", making the stories so personal that he feels ashamed, assuming the traits sometimes of a voyeur and sometimes of a soldier smeared with earth, with all the characters, all the roles he plays, being coherent and feasible for that face which seems centuries old.

It doesn’t surprise me that when it came time to print the most personal of all his records, he lacked the courage to attribute it to anyone. "Arise Therefore", recorded by Steve Albini and released by Drag City in Chicago in 1996, has no author - even though for convenience, it is attributed to the Palace Music. You turn the cover over in your hands, and no name appears except for Will Oldham in singing and guitar.

It is unimaginable what might have happened in the life of this small hidden American hero, but it must have been something terrible, something so terrible that it led him to title, three years later, an album - the album for which he tried to hide again, by changing his name once more - "I See a Darkness". Something that was in progress, that existed during this "Arise Therefore".

Will Oldham strips himself of everything except for a dim light illuminating himself, a drum machine (in my imagination, the old Roland of Big Black changed for the occasion), an electric guitar, some sparks of piano and the image that emerges is incandescent, whispered poetry, rarefied, present.

In a synthetic way, what comes out of these grooves is country and American tradition molded on personal suffering, providing an alternative to the previously existing... in a more complex way, this record and its words are the diary of a man who can't help but tell about himself, who tries to escape the attention of the many who continue to follow him for the magic he manages to create, for the sole pleasure one can feel listening to someone so honest that he can finally feel modesty.

Will Oldham took the photo that became the cover of "Spiderland" adding even greater suggestion to what is the album of suggestion. He can't help it: everything he does slips from his hands, handing itself over to beauty and the heart. He will never be free... I don't mind.