Will Oldham
Peel Session

Naked music.

Like Gregory, the chosen one, the incestuous child of incest, the warrior, the sinner abandoned against his will, the penitent and the resurrected, naked and curled under the weight of guilt and hail and above the opposing weight of the earth: thus the four stones of this Peel Session by Will Oldham.

Nothing more than voice and underground interweaving of two guitars, sometimes supported by an evanescent piano like a runaway father. Music with no time other than that of despair and the awareness of the inevitable end.

L'Ortigara has been my Alaska: instead of gold, I gathered the cold that heals the soul, the fatigue of the stony channels where there were four of us and it seemed to me to have all humanity by my side. Cima XII, an insignificant mountain on this earth, loomed protectively over the bivouac at its feet and over us, insignificant people, closed inside like happy beasts in an underground lair.

L'Ortigara is the place of my escapes, the wine drunk to the point from which returning is difficult. No water, no fuel other than the poor branches of pines and the wood brought from home, many rocks, clouds, chamois. But neither, up there, indifferent people ready to screw you at the first sign of weakness; no improbable and burnt love, no sorrow, no need to become an animal to interact with the city's frost. Living with the serenity of the stone seemed possible to me. Wine. Nothing more than fermented grapes. And when the effect ends, when returning becomes a necessity impossible to elude, you fall. And, as always, Bonnie "Prince" Billy appears in ever-changing roles as a somewhat reassured comforter (Lie Down in the Light) or as an emaciated specter confiding the loss of his gold vein.

Four songs like four vertebrae.

Four songs that creak like old boards stepped on by a drunkard just out of the function (I was drunk at the pulpit, from the 2001 album There Is No One What Will Take Care of You) or that stammer astonished like a throat frightened by revelations as trivial as they are immense and unbearable (the enormous Death to everyone, taken from Oldham's Bible, I see a Darkness, sung with a broken voice and punctuated by a faint and ghostly choir like a cigarette hole in the tablecloth).

"Death to me
And death to you
Tell me what else can we
Do die do"

Four naked songs wander in a nocturnal territory, where the six strings of the acoustic guitar are six leaves lightly falling to the ground and where the strings of a voice touch the soul. But this, like an exposed nerve, barely endures a touch of this entity: and from paralysis, it moves to awakening which, as harsh as it may be, is always preferable to death. Or even just to despair.

 "Arise, therefore".