**THE MAKING OF I SEE A DARKNESS BY BONNIE “PRINCE” BILLY - FEATURING WILL OLDHAM**

Intro:

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim.

Will Oldham grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and began working as an actor in the late 1980s. While attending Brown University, he started playing music under the name Palace and Drag City released the first Palace Brothers single in 1992. A full-length album, There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You, was released in 1993. Other albums followed under varying artist names, including Days in the Wake, Viva Last Blues, Arise Therefore and Joya. In 1998, Oldham started using the name Bonnie “Prince” Billy and began recording songs in a farmhouse in Shelbyville, Kentucky. I See a Darkness was eventually released in 1999.

In this episode, for the 25th anniversary, Will Oldham reflects on how the album came together. This is the making of I See a Darkness.

Will Oldham: My name is Will Oldham and I'm here to talk about the making of the record, I See a Darkness, which we've credited to Bonnie “Prince” Billy. By even calling this entity, “Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy,” I still am embarrassed by that name. It's so stupid. So the understanding is that yeah, that a song like, “I See a Darkness” or “Death to Everyone” or “Today I was an Evil One,” could exist without making an audience recoil or feel like, “Ooh, I don't want to listen to that today, it's just too fucking bleak.” I don't want to put bleakness on a record because that's what we're trying to get away from, we're trying to understand. You do not need to put bleakness into a movie or onto a record, you just have to open your eyes, really. There's a therapeutic aspect that's a part of this music, but it is not necessarily, it's intended as group therapy. It's not intended as like my therapy, it's intended to be something like, “If we laugh together, we get closer.”

I'll try to speak from my perspective about what appears from the outside, like this decision making process that had to do with something called Palace into something called Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Because this is a great record with which to discuss some of this because I tried in the credits to outline the way at the time I viewed making records. I came to music from an acting background and had some of my more impressive upon my life experiences working on movies. And I'd never been around the making of a record and I'd never been in a band prior to any sort of Palace thing. I had just witnessed it from afar. But what I had been involved with was theatrical productions and film productions and TV productions and so those made sense to me. So, I came at the entire process from this kind of different point of view, where I didn't understand either a band or a solo artist concept. Neither made any sense to me whatsoever. I came into it thinking that you would get creatives together and create something, and then that thing would be it. That would be the entity, rather than the band as the entity or an artist, an individual artist as the entity, the song or the record, those are the entities. However, record distributors, record labels, music listeners, record stores have no way of appreciating or understanding or encountering those concepts. So we had these names, you know, we began as Palace Flophouse, then my friend Todd Brashear and I wanted to focus on harmonies for a bit. And again, you have to put something on a flyer, so we called ourselves Palace Brothers. And in order to sort of try to convey to audiences how I looked at these things, I would modify this label from Palace Brothers to Palace Songs, ultimately Palace Music, thinking that using the term, music, all encompassing way of expressing this stuff. So I think of those Palace years kind of as what other people would call their, you know, their apprenticeship years or their college education years potentially or higher education years. And then that sort of climaxed with the record Viva Last Blues. And then sort of my doctoral thesis was Arise Therefore and after that I didn't really know what to do anymore except that I knew that there was nothing else I could do. I was compelled but there was no map, there was no guide as far as what I was, I won't even say interested, it was a compulsion, a compulsion to bring certain energetic forces together into a realized form that also, ideally, would help me make a living.

Also, there was this moment. I had gone to, I used to travel to Australia more often and over the course of the nineties created this incredibly wonderful friendship and musical relationship with, Jim White and Mick Turner of the Dirty Three, at the time, of the Dirty Three. And just being on the other side of the planet, of course, literally turns your brain around and coming home on a flight from a tour in Australia, my brain just felt kind of liberated from all these concerns that I'd had and I thought, the whole idea came at once. This idea that there could be an entity that is a non physical not tangible musical being that would have this name Bonnie “Prince” Billy and that already was a construct and every record could exist intersecting with the concept of that construct or manifesting that construct or having some other relationship to it, but I could stop talking to everybody who would ask about the name, the name, the name, because it's, I think it's a slippery slope. It's very dangerous for a person, as we've seen with so many destroyed lives of people who sing songs and sing songs as individuals who oftentimes are understood to represent themselves. So that, you know, if they write a happy song or a sad song and then go onstage, they have to be that person being happy or being sad, which I think, of course, is going to just destroy a human being, unless that human being is just an emotional titan. And, you know, I think Dolly Parton is maybe the only emotional, true emotional titan in the music business. So I thought like, “Well, you know, I want to be able to sing a ridiculous song, sing a devastating song, sing a frightening song, sing a celebratory song.” And not necessarily feel like it is this person who's speaking with you now, embodying that emotion or that incident or that phenomenon musically at any given point, because that again, that's just an emotional roller coaster. So instead, I had this entity, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, that I could share an appreciation and understanding of with an audience who could embody all of those things at any given time. And as soon as that entity walks off the stage or stops singing or the tape stops rolling, that entity goes away or just continues to exist, but only in the imaginary world, in our collective conscious and our collective unconscious. And so I was really excited, you know, “Okay, I've figured this out,” and started writing songs right away then. And what is Bonnie “Prince” Billy? Well, Bonnie “Prince” Billy sings like any professional singer that we're aware of over the span of, you know, since the beginning of recorded time. So I thought, “Well the songs need to sort of reflect a tradition as well, a kind of a history.” And I thought, “I need to write more bridges,” because I don't, up to that point, I think I had written very few bridges in songs, if any. But then I could approach all of these songs like I was fleshing out the character of, you know, this swashbuckling, one of the most complex, dashing, vulnerable, invincible purveyors of song and in the history of the universe. That was sort of the idea that I would approach and I continue to try to approach that and I'll probably continue to try to approach that for the rest of my life because it's fun. And always infuse all of the Bonnie “Prince” Billy offerings with as much intense reality across the spectrum as possible while also understanding that it is the wonderful world of show business.

And life was very tumultuous during that time. I guess I had an intimate relationship with everybody at the Drag City label, specifically Dan Koretsky, Dan Osborn and Rian Murphy and in the late nineties, there began, our relationship began to deteriorate and I didn't understand why. I could just tell because we used to talk two or three times a day on the telephone. And it got down to once every couple of weeks, which for me was no way of running this musical life or attempting to run a musical life to operate without feedback without exchange. And it got so intense, I didn't know what to do. Of course, we were in the period where some artists that I knew or had some parallels with were jumping into the world of major labels and i kept looking at that and thinking, “Is that a better place potentially to be?” and and pretty much every way I looked at it, it didn't make any sense, it didn't look like a good idea. At the same time, I didn't know what other alternatives I had because Drag City is a fairly unique entity. And my relationship with them, as I mentioned, was incredibly rewarding and fruitful up to a certain point when it began to not be. And it was relatively painful at the time, so the decision was made to split off what I had, I'd created a sub label imprint at Drag City called Palace Records so I could put out different records by different people whose music I found to be interesting or electrifying or compelling or inspiring, but I didn't necessarily feel like I had the words to convince anybody, including Drag City of their value. So I just said, “How about if you let me put out certain things that I'm not going to try to convince you are worth it and I'll absorb any losses that there are, and we're not going to try to necessarily nourish a career, but just to introduce these artists to the idea of making records and to certain audiences, to these artists, these musicians, or these ensembles. So then in whatever it was, 1998 decided and fortunately with the collaboration of my older brother (Ned Oldham) and his colleagues in The Anomoanon, Jack Carneal, Aram Stith and a fellow named Justin Vogt, we created an independent Palace Records and Drag City, as you may know, is a pretty independent label so we were we were pushing the boundaries (laughs) of what an independent label could be. We sort of started from a version of scratch that still did take into account years at that point, five or six years of experience putting out records and either an Anomoanon record, Summer Never Ends, or I See a Darkness where the, I think those were the first two records that we did. “South Side of the World” and “One with the Birds,” that actually was the first independent Palace Records release, a 7-inch. So exciting. So exciting. Like that release is just (laughs), I mean the recording of it was very exciting. I think making music has always been for me a way of, I'm a fairly socially awkward person, or I can be, and it was a way of being in a room with people and having deep and complicated exchanges and to spend time with people in ways in which we could really chew on things together and work things out together. That's what making music kind of has always been about to me about identifying a lack of connection and trying to address that and remedy that with action. I mean, this whole record, I get to marvel at how I think my tendency is always towards creating a parallel reality space. It's very difficult to convince most recording engineers, most professional recording engineers, to get them to fully collaborate on creating imaginary spaces. They tend to want to create facsimiles of real spaces that we experience together in this physical world. And knowing that that's not how we experience records like we disappear into them and end up creating imaginary spaces that probably don't ever resemble at all what the recording engineers or the artists had hoped they would be creating, it's this new hybrid space. And feeling like nothing had to sound even musical, it could sound environmental or dramatic.

So then my father had bought a tobacco farm in the early 1970s with his father. Tobacco and sheep in Shelbyville, Kentucky. There was an old farmhouse, a late 1800s farmhouse, sitting on there in really terrible shape. There was no running water, there was a well outside the kitchen door to pump water and an outhouse about 25 feet away from the house. And by 1994, ‘95, the house was in such disrepair that if something wasn't done about it, it would have to be demolished or it would just fall down of its own accord. And my father decided to put some minimal effort into restoring it just to basic functionality and to putting indoor plumbing in there and gas for the stove and for the heat. I agreed that it was a good idea and I said, I would move in to the house for a while. And I was pretty excited about this idea of living in relative isolation. And then my younger brother (Paul Oldham) was, I guess maybe at odds in his life or at a crossroads in his life. And he said, “I'm going to move in too,” which dampened my enthusiasm a little bit because I was kind of intrigued by the idea of living by myself for a little while in the middle of nowhere and just seeing what that did to my mind. But you know, it was as much my brother's right to live there as it was mine. And I love my brother, both of my brothers, and I thought, “Well, okay, that's fine, let's try it.” And my brother, at that point was, I think he was just finishing up at Indiana University, an audio recording program. So he knew his way around recording. So we both moved in there together and he set up a digital recording machine, I think it was a (Tascam) DA38 if I remember right. And he taught me the basics of using the machine. It was, you know, really fun listening to Kyle Field talk about recording vocals on Light Green Leaves and then listening again to I See a Darkness, which I hadn't listened to probably in 20 years, and understanding some of the freedoms that are allowed to somebody who is recording their, specifically because I'm a singer, singing by oneself. Even my brother would, he would go to the movies, which took hours at the time because it was a 45 minute drive, just even get to the movie theater. And then I could just sit and sing and sing and sing and sing and sing and sing things over and over again and kind of go crazy melodically and emotionally and harmonically in ways that I wouldn't have done even had he been there because he's sort of notoriously stone faced as an engineer, you can just run through some sort of screaming track performance and turn to him and say, “How was that?” And he'll say, “It's fine.” So you had to (laughs), which is good because then you had to know if something worked or not, because you weren't going to get that kind of confirmation from the recording engineer in the person of my brother, Paul. It was a time where I felt like, “Oh, now I can really maybe sing more the things that I imagine the ways that the song should be sung.” Prior to that, it was more like, “Well, I'm going to economize my singing because everybody's here in this room, it's very expensive to be in this room right now. We only have a limited amount of time with all of these musicians and so I'm going to economize my performance and just do kind of the bare minimum to put the song across in as strong a manner as we're capable of doing.” And once we were in this farmhouse isolated out in Shelbyville, we felt like we had some degree of freedom. We didn't feel like the money clock was always ticking. And not having someone there critiquing and or judging one's performance or one's process, I think helped the record create its own identity.

I think most of the songs were written out there in Shelbyville in that house. I remember specifically some of them. You know, where I was sitting and I used at the time, for years and years, I used a handheld cassette recorder as my primary, that's where I kept my notes. And I think I formalized it more than ever with the preparation for the I See a Darkness record. I think this was the first time, rather than putting everybody in the room at once, began to experiment with inviting people to come for a few days, four or five days at a time, by themselves. And it was done with my friends Colin Gagon, David Pajo, and Bob Arellano. I think we initially tracked my brother Paul playing bass and recording, our friend Pete Townsend playing drums and myself playing guitar and singing, and then invited either Bob or Colin to come separately and do their parts. And Pajo was probably in and out of the area, Kentucky, Louisville at the time, so he came out, he helped mix, but also tracked something on the “Song for the New Breed.” All of the singing that is on the final record was done in the initial take of the tracking. So in this case, it would have been voice, bass, electric guitar, and drums all were live. And then there were extra voices added. You know, I did lots of harmonies and Colin did a fair amount of backing singing as well. Pursuing music as a way of communing with other people, it continues to this day, I'm not somebody who puts together a sonic concept of what a record should end up sounding like, like literally sounding like the individual sounds. And in asking Colin Gagon to come and play on the record, it was definitely because I know he's a brilliant musician with, with just kind of a, it's like it's in his genetic makeup, just a relationship to music and to pitch and to rhythm. And he's a great accordion player and piano player, but I mostly just wanted to be with him. And I didn't anticipate how beautifully and thoroughly his piano playing would shape the power and feel of this record. It did not, you know, I didn't think about that at all. I just thought, “Oh, it'd be great if Colin could come out and hang out and work on this for five days.” But the piano from the very beginning, it's, you know, he introduces everybody sonically. He sort of opens the record up to everybody with his first chords and he knew how to be open. I mean, it's just like, “Come in, come in!” Those, the very first chords at the very beginning of the record, at the very beginning of the song is Colin just, you know, telling everybody, “Here, I'll scoot over, you come in and sit here with me and be a part of this record.”

“A Minor Place”

Fun with the bridge. So much fun with the bridge, having a bridge. And, you know, the sort of cathartic explosion that can happen when the bridge goes to the V chord. I'm not sure if I'm remembering right, and yet I will make a stark admission, which is that I believe that “A Minor Place” may have been inspired by the setting to music and recording of the Woody Guthrie lyrics that, Wilco and Billy Bragg did, you know, they did two records. One was Mermaid Avenue and the second one might've been “Son of Mermaid Avenue,” or it was, there was a second one as well (Mermaid Avenue Vol. II). I think it was on the first one. Wilco was not a band that I understood, I still don't actually understand them. I know that they are wonderful people and that their audiences are thoughtful, interesting human beings, but for some reason my ears glaze over and they always have whenever I've heard Wilco from the beginning. I don't understand it, don't know why, it's not to say anything against their music. And kind of same with Billy Bragg. I could understand what his value was. And that he was awesome in his way, but for some reason he didn't push any of my buttons. And Woody Guthrie, sometimes even similarly, you know, I understand the monumental aspect of his canon and his influence. He's still not the greatest singer in the world. I think probably the bulk of his power had to do with his rapport with his audiences all over the country and the specific issues sometimes that brought people together for the music to happen. But I liked that record a lot. Obviously, I'm a big supporter of collaborative efforts, and I find that there's tremendous value in bringing disparate creative forces together to create something. And that's maybe what I loved about listening to that record, is just the evidence of the alchemy of the differing forces coming together. But, there's a song on there, I think it's either called, or the refrain is, “Way Down Yonder in a Minor Key,” and it really resonated with me and I thought just to expand upon this idea of understanding the power and privilege even of limited reach and limited resonance and knowing that the things that I am most enthusiastic about in the world, for the most part, and the things that move me the most are not things that necessarily have global reach. You know, I've been to big arena concerts, I saw Prince in concert and it meant almost nothing because of the size of the audience. And similarly, like when I tried to have an acting career and started to understand that most film sets were these massive undertakings with so many people and so much money, and it had just almost less than zero appeal. I didn't understand why anyone would engage in those things. You know, when people would talk about small budget movies or small budget records and think like, “You do not understand, you do not know what a small budget record is.” There's no way to say what I See Darkness cost if you had to just put a price tag on the, I don't know, flights? The flights and feeding people? We're talking about, you know, I don't know, eight or nine hundred dollars maybe? Something like that? And then I, you know, I think I paid everybody at the time. So I probably, who knows, who knows what I paid folks, a thousand bucks or something like that. It might've cost three grand or something like that, which is what some people with micro budgets would say is a massive budget. But most people in the music business would say like, “What was that, to demo a song? 3,000 dollars.” Otherwise it's just understanding that I still appreciate a show in which the audience is 300 people or less, ideally less than 50 people, ideally less than 24 people. That's when the magic kind of happens. And I just, yeah (laughs), I like small things, believing that it's the stronger, tinier things that make up the strongest entities or the strongest forces. So yeah, it's definitely a song celebrating limited reach. And what do they say? You know, “Thinking globally, acting locally.” I feel like the smaller, more intimate and more vulnerable any sort of artistic experience is, the more resonant and powerful and useful I think it ends up being. And so that song is a celebration of that.

You know, it did seem to be an obvious and evident statement of purpose. And so it may have been thought of right away as the initial song and it celebrates, you know, trying to turn what was potentially a negative into a positive, which was this separation from Drag City, which were incredibly vital to my life and living and morale. And, you know, this decision had been made, for the time being and potentially forever, for all we knew at the time, separate. And to separate not by what you know most people of the time we're doing by stepping into the echelons of the major labels of the more money than and powerful but in the other direction and not really feeling bad about it at all and so the song was also helping to buttress that and and reinforce this idea that, “Well we're taking a fork in the road and we're taking definitely continuing to take a road that is obviously less traveled.” I think my father told me at some point that I needed patience and I needed to focus at a certain point and sometimes you do something that you're aware, for you, seems to have power. But we don't know, you know, we don't know what the manifestation of that power is because as much as the future resembles the past, it's also going to be unfamiliar and completely different from anything we've experienced before. And so you have to hold on to something as you walk through the storm.

“Nomadic Revery (All Around)”

For years, “Nomadic Revery” was a big favorite for me. I mean, it was like a song that I just felt like, “Oh my goodness, this is something that I kind of have always wanted to do.” Whatever it is that that is, you know, like what is it? Making up the song, being a part of the song, singing the song, having people listen to the song, being able to sing those lyrics, you know, including the bridge and something about the chord progressions as well. They probably came from some songs that are so deeply a part of me that I don't even remember where I lifted the chord progressions from, but also when I would play the chord progressions, it felt like, “I'm owning these, but I think that they're somebody else's, but I own them now.” Because obviously the significance of the chord progression wasn't enough to carry it forward so that I even remember what song I'm getting this from or songs, it might be multiple songs where these progressions exist. I felt, you know, from the time I graduated high school in 1988, I more or less left home. And, you know, I don't think I slept in the same bed for, more than, you know, two months at a time from 1988 to maybe 2001 or something like that. So there was just this feeling of constant motion, constant motion. And, you know, sometimes being surprised, I'd be on a subway somewhere and all of a sudden I'd have this strange reverberation throughout my body and my brain and I'd think, “What's that? Oh. I feel at home.” But I would be in the, I'd be somewhere, not anywhere near what anybody would call my home, but I would feel, “Oh, I'm, this is great. I'm going to hold onto this feeling.” And it would last five or six minutes and then it would go away. But this sense that I wasn't ever positive whether I was in pursuit of something or being pursued by something. So it's a song for people who feel that they are compelled to move, whether it's in their brains or with their bodies. And there is this constant, constant, unrelenting urgency, but is it because we are being chased or pursued and or persecuted, or is it because we need to settle, we are looking to find something that is true or something that is comforting or some, some haven of some sort that allows one to wake up and in any way, shape or form, recognize that we occupy a valid space in the world.

It has, built into it, a dynamic, that was just the best singing practice. Every time we would play the song, it was the best singing practice. Cause I could just go hog wild in the bridge and in the repetitions of the final chorus. I use the guitar out of convenience for accompaniment, but it's always been about voices and singing. That's what I listen for, usually, in other music. And that's what I pay attention to in my own, you know, as a music creating person. And it's like body surfing, you don't need anything, you can make everything happen without having to charge something, plug it in, tune it, anything like that. You just, you stay in tune with yourself, it's your body.

I like the line, “All around the left buttock and all around the right. It's still, I am there physically every time I sing those lines. I'm, you know, I'm navigating these buttocks in my brain. And maybe it's because buttocks don't get a lot of lyrical attention, with those words, and yet they are, you know, such wonderful terrains to explore. And then we've got the “woo hoos,” which are, you know, one of my best friends since my teenage years is Todd Brashear, and he's always been a big Rolling Stones person and helped me explore the Rolling Stones for a long time. And so I'm sure that the “woo hoos” are like the “Sympathy for the Devil” “woo hoos” thrown in there. And that's a fun one, you know, live because audiences oftentimes will, on their own accord, join in on the “woo hoos.” You can hear Bob Arellano's crazy, crazy, crazy guitar solos. He's a crazy guitar player, just a crazy guitar player, you know? And I don't mean crazy. Like some would say, “Oh, Slash just laid down this crazy solo,” but more almost unhinged. Like, listening to his guitar playing over the past couple of days as I've listened to I See a Darkness, it makes much more sense now than it did then. And still now, it doesn't make complete sense, but it makes a lot more sense now. Which is often the case when I'm playing with people who I love and I love the way they look at the world and the way they listen to music and make music. Things make sense in a way that is not traditional, but can't be ignored or denied. And that's Bob Arellano's musicianship.

“I See a Darkness”

The song, “I See a Darkness,” I remembered the Mekons, because the Mekons have a song called “When Darkness Falls.” They have a song called “Prince of Darkness.” They have a song called “Only Darkness Has the Power.” “Darkness and Doubt.” And so it was this wonderful revelation that “I See a Darkness” is actually just a Mekons tribute song.

I had found not long ago, the post-it notes onto which I had written the lyrics as the song was coming together, and I think we scanned them and put them on the inner sleeve maybe of the record that came out a few years ago called Songs of Love and Horror, that came out at the same time as the lyric book. I'm not sure that I've put together many sets of lyrics on post-it notes, especially I think those were post-it notes with a commercial entity identified on the post-it notes, who provided the free pad of post-it notes, and it was some sort of, I don't remember, plumbing supply or something like that. And there were small post-it notes. So I had to use multiple notes in order to get the whole lyric on there. It's a song about friendship. There's a lot of Bonnie “Prince” Billy songs about friendship, either explicitly or tangentially, but addressing somebody with whom I knew I had a creative connection and a personal connection. It of course is a song of optimism, guarded optimism and concerned optimism, like that the optimism will not necessarily bear the fruit that we ideally would like it to bear because there are maybe one too many forces against certain kinds of optimism out in the world.

The verses, they don't share chord progressions. They have different chord progressions, the two verses. So they're, it's kind of like an A part, then a chorus, then a B part, and then a chorus. And the choruses were meant to be kind of triumphant. There was a big guitar part that I had tried to impose upon Bob Arellano and he played it and it was stupid. So it's not on there, thank goodness. That was the only thing I think I ever tried to get him to play on the record and it was a bad idea. But at the time I wanted the record, two guides for the environment of the record that I was thinking about were Lee “Scratch” Perry's productions of Bob Marley and the Wailers, specifically the record, Soul Rebels, which I'd heard at Bob Arellano’s house in Rhode Island, and just impressed me to no end as a kind of a record that I think of as these, I've long been intrigued by, if not obsessed by, post-apocalyptic landscapes as represented in books and movies. It's not, doesn't seem to be represented that often in music, except in these imaginary spaces. So I, listening to Soul Rebels, by ostensibly Bob Marley and the Wailers, but at least as much by Lee “Scratch” Perry to me sounds like a record that could be made in a decimated landscape, potentially even in a bunker, you know, that's the rebirth of humanity or the continuance of humanity based on a very small group of people who are acting, who are thinking like, “Well, if we want to hold on to some of the best parts of music up to this point of this, you know, massive cataclysmic event in human history and then carry it forward, what would we get rid of and what would we move forward?” And that's when I listened to that record or to, Roger Miller's A Tender Look at Love. And there's a few other records along these lines, maybe Kevin Coyne and Dagmar Krause’s Babble, where it feels like that would be the gold record that I would send into space to try to fool people in outer space into thinking that we were that awesome. So it was Bob Marley and the Wailers, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Soul Rebels, as well as Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town. Because that record also has a, there's no other record that really creates a similar space that is upliftingly bleak.

I mean, how strange and unique the record sounds and it's really awesome listening to it after listening to (Little Wings’) Light Green Leaves and (The Microphones’) Mount Erie also, even those, those records came a few years after, but just hearing the oddity of the sound of the record and the world of the record. It sounds homespun and yet there is, you know, there's a confidence in those builds and it's a realization of certain artistic dreams to pull off those builds, you know, and not feel like humility needs to rule the day. But that checked bombast has a really, really marvelous and crucial place in our musical world. And that's another song that is so beautifully and so remarkably sonically defined in this recording by Collin’s piano playing. Not to say Pete Townsend's drumming, on the whole record, because Pete's drumming doesn't resemble anybody's drumming that I've ever heard before. He's his own and he brings, on this record, he brings power without hitting hard, he brings groove without necessarily locking it in. None of his beats resemble beats that I was familiar with before or am familiar with since then, and yet they all work beautifully at putting the songs across.

Adult issues in general are not things that are given enough lyrical attention in my opinion. And my friendships, my non sexual friendships (laughs), not necessarily, you know, with men or women, are huge, you know, they're just huge, and complex. And part of making up a song, there's a part of the brain that understands implicitly that making up a song, it may be a song that one will find oneself encountering if not performing for years to come, countless times. And so filling the songs with as much as possible to, you know, unsolved problems or relationships that are just exploding with potential energy and contradiction, which is each of our friendships, I think, are that way. And,obviously, there's so many more love songs than friendship songs, and I don't necessarily understand that because, you know, right now I'm married to the person I intend to be married to the rest of my life, and so exploring courtship is not, I don't really, not really that interested in exploring courtship right now, but I am interested in exploring ideas of relationships that are, you know, beyond the initial stages of the relationship that are deep, deep, deep into the relationship. And they're great to sing about.

I had met Matt Sweeney, I think, briefly sometime around this time, ‘96 or ‘97, maybe ‘98. But then when I finished making I See a Darkness, and we had this, you know, effectively a brand new record label, and I needed to figure out what to do with it. And so I went to New York City for an extended stay, figuring that putting myself bodily in such a place would be helpful if we were starting from scratch and letting the world know that this record exists. So I went to New York City instead of being in Shelbyville, Kentucky where nobody would, you know, encounter this stuff. And I started working with a publicist at a publicity firm called, Nasty Little Man. And at the time, Sweeney was sort of an honorary staff member there because he's got an astounding way of just, he's a publicist, he's kind of a publicist. He loves the things he loves and he loves to turn other people onto the things that he loves. It's his passion. And we had a mutual friend who was in distress and so I ran into him one day on the way to Nasty Little Man, we started talking, we talked, talked, talked, became close friends and started hanging out all the time. And at one point he, a year or two later, probably two years later, he called and said that he had just run into somebody, Neil Strauss, I think, the kind of bizarre music into sex writing person out there, who I'll be eternally grateful to forever, but he said that he'd run into Neil Strauss, I think, who'd said that he'd just played a bunch of Bonnie “Prince” Billy records or something, or he played I See a Darkness, maybe some other things for Rick Rubin, something like that. And then Sweeney, he saw Rick Rubin on the street, introduced himself and mentioned that we were friends and Rubin said, “Oh well, Johnny Cash is just, we've just cut a demo of ‘I See a Darkness’ and Sweeney called me to tell me that. And that was you know right there, even if it wasn't true, that was you know one of the most, it felt like an achievement. You know, it was one of the most exciting things that I ever heard in my entire life. And that's it, you know, this demo. I know, never count one's chickens before they hatch, and so I, you know, I just thought, “Well, that's really neat, that's one of the, thank you so much for sharing that.” And then we did a show at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, me and Sweeney, probably Mike Fellows, maybe James Lowe playing drums. And Rick Rubin came to the show and said, “Yeah, we have cut that song. And, you know, what would you think about maybe coming out, coming to a session and overdubbing some piano on it?” I said, “Of course, I'd love to do that. Absolutely.” He said, “Okay, great, here's my phone number. “ And I, you know, didn't know what to do exactly. So I called him the next day. He didn't answer. I left a message and I said, “Mr. Rubin, this is Will Oldham. I just, I have to tell you, I can't play piano and I didn't play it on the record, Colin Gagon did. And I don't necessarily expect anything to come of this whatsoever. However, if there were any way out of this brief, you know, window you thought there might be an appropriate time for me to potentially meet Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, that would mean the world to me. Because they were big in my world, in my brain, you know, like both of them together, especially cause I love, you know, I love the energy of people together. And I love Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash's energy together. It's like, it was like Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema or something like that. So he called back and said, “Okay, okay, well, we're doing a session in a few weeks at my house in Los Angeles, if you'd like to come to that.” So I booked a flight out there using Southwest points to Los Angeles. It was a Sunday. I arrived in the morning. I rented a car and I had no plan except just to call Rick Rubin and go over to his studio. And I landed and I'm, you know, pulling over every two or three miles from the airport into the city, going to a phone booth and calling the number and nobody's answering and I'm thinking, “Boy, you know, there's egg on my face. What a rude move to like fly out to California because some guy said I can come to this recording session.” But then at around 2 in the afternoon a woman answered and I said, “My name's Will, Rick invited me out to this session.” She said, Oh, he's just waking up now. Yeah, you can come on over. Come on over.” Gave me the address off the Sunset Strip, went there. Rubin was coming down, I could hear Johnny Cash's voice on a loudspeaker from the studio in the depths of the house. And so Cash comes out. Rubin comes out, Rubin introduces me. You know, I said something like, “Hello, Mr. Cash.” He said, “Please don't call me Mr. Cash. You can call me John, JR, or Johnny, but don't call me Mr. Cash.” And Ruben said, “This is Will Oldham, he wrote that song, ‘I See a Darkness.’”And Cash said, “Well, then why don't we work on that song right now?” Which I was not, you know, of course, was not expecting. And we went in and immediately started working on it. And they played it for me then. And I didn't hear anything wrong with it (laughs). I could, you know, to me, it sounded like the coolest thing I could ever have imagined in my wildest dreams. It was him and then somebody playing acoustic guitar. I said, “Who's playing guitar?” They said, “It might be Randy Scruggs, I'm not sure.” So I'm not even sure that they knew at the time who was playing guitar, but Cash was singing on it, it sounded fantastic. But Cash said he wasn't happy with his delivery, “Would I help out?” And ultimately I tracked a whole guide vocal and they put our voices together and found that the voices sounded good together. And then Cash tried to sing along to my guide vocal. That didn't work, which is good because that's a stupid idea. So then the next idea was for me to go and sit in the vocal booth with him, just sitting knee to knee, you know, with our faces about two and a half feet from each other with him on the mic turning to me each time it was time to begin a line to wait for my signal for him to begin the line. Which is, you know, one of the most exciting challenges I've ever been given because it took so much presence of mind to just not disintegrate into nothingness at the surreality of the experience. But I'm a musical entity in many ways, you know, it's what I, I am a human being as well, who has other interests, I guess, but I look at the world through music and how it's created and what it does and what it's intended to do. And that's something that, in part at least, I believe that I share with Johnny Cash. And so, in that moment, it was just this thing where I thought, you know, this is one of those weird things, weird times where everybody may have some degree of imposter syndrome. At that moment, I did not have an imposter syndrome, I felt like, “Oh, this is one of the few things that I actually feel like I can do, is to guide this music person through the performance of this song. And so let's just do this.” But that's all happening in fragments of seconds, because we're doing it. And then it worked. You know, we did one take with me sitting there with him and it's awesome. And then I think June Carter Cash came in and sat on the couch with me and, you know, talked to me about the first time they heard the song. She said it was on a tape, a cassette that Rick had sent them in Jamaica, where they had a house. And she said that after they heard the song, she claims that she turned to her husband and said, “John, you have got to record that song.”

Well, the playfulness has to do with not wanting the song to potentially sink under its own weight and putting, “you you,” in there is just plain stupid. And it's intended to just say, “Look, I may feel a little overburdened right now, but I understand that it's a thin line between this overburdened sensation and completely snapping out of it and looking up and hearing birds sing.” And “you you” is just a way of reminding everybody that it's just a song in case anybody were to think, “Oh my goodness, this is so bleak and so terrible to listen to.” The “you you” is just, it's just that little valve, release valve. And then pushing the “you you” to its limits with “Another Day Full of Dread,” by talking about dread and fear and putting it all in there and trying to negate all of their power, even for a moment.

“Another Day Full of Dread”

I went to Haiti a couple of years later and I performed that song there in a town called Jacmel. But my understanding and appreciation of many of the things that Haiti represents must've started then, but I know it got a lot bigger. I was beginning to become aware of how unfathomable Haiti is. In our relationship to Haiti and our relationship to it as one culture, just negatively determining the fate of another culture in so many ways. And the indomitable human spirit represented by people in Haiti, even as, not only does the socio political world, but even the natural world seemed to have nothing but the worst things to offer to an entire population. And so, I didn't know much of anything at the time, but my sense was that Haiti is a powerful place and group of people to pay attention to for our own mental and spiritual health. As example as well as a real thing that unfortunately it has to be said again and again deserves some degree of attention, but putting it into song saying the only way to confront a problem is to not be overwhelmed by a problem.

“Another Day Full of Dread,” it's beating that suffering, but not dead horse, beating it so hard. This idea of trying to put forward a comically relentless dark tone over this whole collection of songs, because it has the lines, “Ding dong, a silly song, sure do say something's wrong,” and just making up the nonsense syllables, which are motifs in vocalized music since before language, I'm sure. And so all of these songs are, they're also in addition to being about all different things, they are about being songs and wanting to just have something to sing. There's a guitar solo on the break that might be, it's one of, if there's more than one, there are fewer than five guitar solos that I've performed on record, and that's the first one, I think.

Vaccines have kind of a lot of baggage right now, but I have thought in the past that a lot of the music that I've been involved with has a vaccination quality to it, in that it is kind of intended to be the injection of the reprehensible force into one system, but in small enough doses that the body can create a healthy response to it. And that's kind of what this record is. And a lot of different things that I've been involved with are kind of intended to be. It's to take something that feels like it could kill you and just give you a little bit and allow your body to create a relationship with it and then ultimately overcome it.

“Death to Everyone”

“Death to Everyone,” the intention was very overtly to create a song that could live alongside Leiber and Stoller's composition and the ultimate recording of it by Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?” Because it's, that's just one of the most effective records in my experience. And yeah, again, to just have as much fun with the idea of inescapable annihilation. I know, “You in black dress and black shoe,” I think I was singing to Polly Jean Harvey, in my mind, who I don't think I'd had any interactions with her at that point. I hadn't met her or anything, but she loomed large in my brain as a a colleague at a distance, you know, someone who I would look to for guidance and signs and symbols, especially because she's just one of the more incredible singers of the past, whatever, 30 years and somebody who, she was friends of friends or colleagues of colleagues. Her approach to her use of voice and lyric and the whole world of song and history was something that I related to and also felt like we were not necessarily taking similar steps in any way, but we were taking steps on the same ground at the same time, maybe.

And so even putting in the chorus, the hosing part and “hosing,” meant to be a, you know, a euphemism for fucking, although there's been all sorts of wonderful interpretations about what hosing meant. When I would do that live, there's a Tony! Toni! Toné! song. I can't remember what it's called (“Party Don’t Cry”) but I would make the audience sing this Tony! Toni! Toné! song and I think I would have like women or anybody who identified with a high range singing was supposed to sing, “Don't cry.” And then the boys are supposed to go, “Dry your eyes.” This was from this Tony! Toni! Toné! song and then I would get them to chant it in rhythm, and then I would sing the lines from the song over it. It's like (sings), “Everybody wants to live, nobody wants to die. When I pass away, party don't cry.” And so we'd do that for a couple minutes and then go into “Death to Everyone.”

You know, “Death to Everyone,” it's a two chord song on the record. Live, I've added some more chords to it now, which is makes it more fun to perform solo, I guess. But it was just yeah, it's just two chords, then it has a little “do die do die do,” which is both Johnny Cash, which is pretty cool. There's like a Johnny Cash reference, which is also a Mekons reference, because he does it in a song, “do die do die do.” And then Jon Langford does it in a Mekons song as well. “What else can we do die do?” Yeah.

“Knockturne”

There's a few times on this record where I've made up words. I mean, even the title of the song, “Nocturne” with a K at the beginning. Even listening to it this morning, I was listening to it this morning, and it's still, at the time and now, feels like one of the great musical accomplishments of my life. I just love that song.

One band that I loved when I was a teenager was the band, The Feelies. And one of their strengths seems to be the ability to convey gentleness at a furious pace. And it's that gentleness that, you know, we all can use a little more genuine gentleness and comfort in our lives. And I felt that this song, to my mind, successfully conveys a kind of resolution, a kind of gentleness, even as it is addressing things like sexual penetration. It's a grown up lullaby, a love song that includes bodily fluids very actively.

My own sexual experience was relatively limited up to that point. But, you know, I think I remember Pajo once going to Amsterdam and you know he likes to, over the course of his life, still he likes to push the envelope sometimes and bizarre and discomfiting ways but I think he had specifically gone into you know in the in the nineties, pre internet, had gone into a porn shop and bought some out there magazines that would just be fully illegal in the United States. And, you know, when he came back to the United States, he packed them in his suitcase so that if a customs person opened it, that's the first thing that they would see. And I remember specifically like an image from one of these magazines where there's just a, there's a, I don't know, you know, a gaping hole, that's about to be maybe penetrated in this photo. I've never seen a photo before or since as sort of compellingly horrific. When I talk about like, “something mawed,” singing that line, I can't help, but I always think of that, that image from that terrible, terrible magazine. And think though that, you know, those are people too.

For it's such a tiny song, it has a nice dynamic to it. The dynamic range is very small and yet the dynamics are strong within that tiny framework. And we’re talking about this record, so I'm thinking about Colin a lot, but I feel like the things that he contributed in this song, as well as in “Today I Was an Evil One,” specifically, just a kind of, you know, accessing this language that he speaks that I do not speak. The way he plays the piano parts on “Knockturne” somehow got everything that I hoped the song could potentially be. That it's a gentle song that is not vanilla, necessarily.

“Madeline Mary”

“Madeline Mary,” ostensibly, it's a tale of the sea. And one that resembles in kind of how the lyrics unfold and how the story unfolds. It resembles certain kinds of traditional ballads and sea shanties in the holes in the narrative that allow for tons of imagination or potentially for listeners and new singers to keep some lines and add their own lines and get rid of other lines and tell the story of Madeline Mary. And it's, the details are far enough apart from each other that the character of, like, Madeleine Mary, you know, being the handsome cabin boy, perhaps, who is famously a woman who wanted to go to sea for one reason or another and disguised herself as a man in order to be accepted as a crew member. But this was more like it is a crew member and yet her femininity is not disguised, but somehow she has a position on there and then her position becomes a point of conflict among everybody else on board trying to figure out what to do about the conundrum that there is this other kind of person on board.

That's a one chord song so that was a big achievement. This is where Pete delivers such force on the drums and yet when you listen to it, he's not really hitting the drums very hard at all. Bob went crazy with the guitar, Paul went crazy with the bass. And this was one where I remember specifically getting lost in adding the singing parts by myself with nobody around in ways that I wouldn't have been able to do had anybody been around.

“Song for the New Breed”

So yeah Dianne Bellino, who was my partner at the time throughout all of the 1990s. And she was an, you know, an awesome creative mind and creative partner in many things and a constant source of inspiration. And yeah, this was trying to figure out, because she's completely non musical, so trying to figure out, “Well, how can we align our creative forces together in some way?” And that, that was “Song for the New Breed,” because she was constantly writing. And the lyrics were very evocative. I think maybe it was probably from an idea that she had intended to expand cinematically or in some sort of written narrative. I think there was a lot of energy and concentration devoted to singing somebody else's lyric and that probably affected the delivery because there was a lot of just thinking, thinking, thinking going on, which is a great challenge because you're reading the spirit of somebody and you want to inflect the music or the resulting song with the uniqueness of your understanding of that person and the relationship between two people. So whenever I'm given elements by somebody else, it's not just looking at the elements, but looking at what specifically about that person is so exciting and so inspiring. How can we make something that reflects that special power to make a record of that power, to make a record of that connection, to make a record of that communication. And yeah, listening to it, it seems like we pulled it off. I mean, I'm kind of amazed right now listening to it to hear our connection made manifest in that way.

I mean the song is weird, you know, the chord structure is strange, the melody is strange. And it doesn't sound as weird to me now, at the time I just thought, “What?” And it's describing, you know, a humanoid beast fomenting inside of a womb, not a human, but a humanoid kind of thing. And so the song is kind of that, but I think there was a concern that I didn't understand what it was. And so asked Dave (Pajo) if he would, with his touch, sort of help set this mess, you know, musically and make it a little more comprehensible. I don't think we had to worry about it as much now that I listened to it, except I love his playing on it, so it's all good.

“Today I Was an Evil One”

Yeah, that one feels Stonesy to me. It's so ramshackle and rickety sounding in many ways. And yet it's, you know, it's a good time. I know that I'm stretching the boundaries of believability, but I feel that it's like a, you know, outtake from Side 2 of Exile on Main Street kind of feeling song. It feels kind of Southern, it feels kind of small town, small town, good time. Even maybe Steinbecky, Cannery Row, kind of, just, yeah, making fun of being in bad shape. The horn section in “Today I Was an Evil One” is synth horns and you don't even have to listen that closely to hear the synthetic aspects of those horns. I don't even remember what the synth was. It might have been a little Nord. Yeah, there was some sort of synth lying around. The piano's a real piano, but the organs and other things are probably all the exact same synth.

Colin and Bob, I met them in Providence, Rhode Island when I tried to go to school for a few years at Brown University. I met them right away. You know, you're open and vulnerable, your brain is open, your heart is open, your soul is open, you run into people as, as I understand it. And we're all in this vulnerable place and so we dive into each other's wounds and kind of make an infectious little home in each other's psyches and general life trajectories. And that's what Colin and Bob did with me. And, when we were at school, we had formed a trio called Robert and the Country Priests named after the Robert Bresson movie, Diary of a Country Priest, and that was the first time we all played together. And we die, before we made I See a Darkness, we had gone at Bob's invitation to Cuba and played a couple shows in Cuba, playing some of his songs, some of my younger brother's band Speed To Rome song, because Paul was on the tour and Pete Townshend was on the tour and Colin was on the tour. And the record, Joya, was a very difficult thing to figure out, there were a number of attempts made at a similar grouping of songs. And finally it was done in an accelerated, intense, I think it might've been a three day session in Chicago where we tracked for two days and mixed for one day, the Joya record. And it was augmented pharmaceutically with something, I can't remember if we'd gotten, we might've gotten it in Mexico, but some sort of like amphetamine kind of thing. Yeah just playing with Bob was always, always, always an adventure, whether we were in the studio or live somewhere. It's just wonderful. He's unhinged and yet he never rides off the rails completely. He’s just yeah, just a beautiful, beautiful person.

I think in “Black,” one of the first lines is, “Everything was luked and downy.” And “luked,” the intention was that everything had become lukewarm. And “humboly,” it's just thinking, you know, “I can't think of the right word, well, maybe because the right word doesn't exist yet. So let's just make up the right word right now.” And “humboly” is a better word than humbly. Humbly, it can't be humble, it's got an entry in the, you know, Oxford English dictionary where “humboly” isn't even that great. It doesn't even get an entry in the Oxford English dictionary.

“Black”

We recorded “Black” in a big way that felt a lot like “Death to Everyone” actually. And it just, it either felt redundant or it just didn't move forward enough. So just out of desperation, I think, in the mix, I just said, “Well, let me just run through the song this way and at least it will exist.” Because it just didn't work in the full band version. I just figured I had practiced it enough by myself that I could get it across and I realized that potentially, in the fact of it sounding so significantly different ultimately from everything else on the record, that would make up for its, the lack of what I think of as the crucial collaboration of all the other musicians. Their absence makes them present.

Because I was trying to translate it from my idea of it being a full band arrangement also, there was a lot of freedom, the arrangement could change as I was playing it. I don't think that song was ever played the same before or since. This new record is the first time where I've embraced the idea of recording the singing after the guitar. At the time I felt like it had to be that, and part of it was because I also feel like, and I haven't walked away from that with this new process that I may or may not continue with, but the whole idea that a record is a record. It is a record of things happening at a certain time among certain people. And there is some construction and realignment of sonic signals. It should always be in the service of the capturing of something happening, mistakes and all. That's what brings me back to, you know, listening to records again and again is, you know, you're, you're hearing a snapshot of decisions happening, of a brain working, a musical brain working. And so that's part of like wanting to track vocals live is just if anybody cares to hear it, you know, who wants to hear perfection? I don't want to hear perfection, I want to hear striving towards something that doesn't even resemble perfection. The striving or the attempt is a part of what we're listening to because then we're carried forward with it, where, you know, we're arm in arm with the performers.

Yeah, “Black” is another, obviously it's an examination of a friendship. I used a specific friendship as a model. There's nothing about it except you know, abstract and tone and intention. But the name “Black,” I have a friend who I'd worked with musically who used a pseudonym, Roy Black. And so I thought, “Oh, this is good, I’ll just call him Black in the song.” He's a very challenging, I love him so much. Since I met him in 1989, I've considered him to be kind of a soulmate, one of my best friends, and yet I saw him about a week and a half ago in Washington, D.C. and he still continues to flummox and frustrate. So yeah, it was an exploration of a difficult friendship that's full of love and respect.

“Raining in Darling”

One of the big achievements I felt like with “Raining in Darling” was its brevity. It's so short and dynamic. My friend, Nuala Kennedy, who's an Irish flute player, I think was somewhat frustrated with how short it was and offered up a second verse, which we've performed together sometimes just for fun. Cause it's a really fun song to exist inside of. And you can feel short changed by how short it is.

I guess I thought of it as being Roy Orbison-y in its dynamic and that, you know, (sings) “It don't rain anymore.” I'm sure I was thinking about Roy Orbison at the time. Roy Orbison, you know, being a huge force on his own, but then always thinking about the Roy Orbison, Glenn Danzig brief collaboration in the 1980s is a huge inspiration. And, you know, Danzig, I'm sure was a big inspiration on all of these lyrics and this record specifically, but Roy Orbison there in that romantic wailing. And a nice way of ending, you know, ending a record with something just kind of succinct and as wonderful as possible so that someone might be encouraged to just flip the record over and start it over again.

It was a wilder, more fully realized world than I'd ever been able to successfully put together in a record before. It was a huge adventure because we were calling the pressing plants and the CD plants and the, I can't remember if we did a cassette or not, I don't think we did a cassette at the time. And then just taking it out. It was frightening and yet it was thrilling, like going to New York City with the record and then traveling to different parts of the world, you know, in this new exploration time of being these independents accountable to ourselves and responsible to ourselves for the most part. You know, up to that point, I had felt coming out of different records like Viva Last Blues, just thinking how against all odds, something came out of these recording sessions and felt really, really good about pretty much everything, I wouldn't have put it out otherwise, but at the same time, seeing that working with independent labels and embracing the minor places of the world, it was an education about what success is. And realizing by that point that it was nothing that anybody could ever have defined for us previously and it was something that was being defined as we lived right then. And so taking this record out into the world, I had no idea what could possibly happen. I knew it wouldn't be a big hit because there just wasn't the infrastructure for it to ever be that kind of, you know, to have sales or financial success. So it was about something else. It was another calling card for creating and nourishing human connection.

Like I say, I hadn't listened to it in a long time and listening to it now, it does feel like a kind of high point, but you know, a lot of the greater discoveries through the process of making the record were fleshed out in completely divergent and different ways with Ease Down the Road and The Letting Go and Beware ultimately or even this new record now. And I think also because we were so, there was a desperation to the making of it and a loneliness and an isolation. So in that way, it's not a high point. Nobody wants to relive desperation or that kind of just sort of existential urgency. And yet, seeing that we attacked it with some degree of a sense of humor and some kind of patience and that there was a methodical quality to how we dealt with the situation, that feels good. It was the first time I worked with Sammy Harkham, who did all the illustrations on the lyric sheets and my mother's (Joanne Oldham) skull on the cover. And Sammy did the painting that's on the back of the LP. I learned a lot from it and kept pulling things from it. And it's also, you know, it was around that time that I met lots of people who are my friends now, including say Kyle (Field), and hearing this record and understanding that the strangeness of it, at the time, might have been fairly eye opening and liberating for certain other people involved in similar efforts or were yet to be involved in similar efforts and seeing like that there's a scope and a relationship to quote unquote reality that is accessible to those of us working with our own little toolboxes. So I think it may have been helpful to other folks because we were able to experiment and other folks could benefit from that experimentation.

I See a Darkness, the record, was Bonnie “Prince” Billy's entre to the world. It was as if some human being of great power and influence had deigned to write Bonnie “Prince” Billy a letter of recommendation saying, “This is my nephew, treat him kindly. As he is completely inexperienced, but he's got good intentions and good bones.

Outro:

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Bonnie “Prince” Billy. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase I See a Darkness. Instrumental music by Generifus. Thanks for listening.

Credits:

"A Minor Place"

"Nomadic Revery (All Around)"

"I See a Darkness"

"Another Day Full of Dread"

"Death to Everyone"

"Knockturne"

"Madeleine-Mary"

"Song for the New Breed"

"Today I Was an Evil One"

"Black”

"Raining in Darling"

℗ Royal Stable Music (ASCAP)

Played by:

Bob Arellano

Colin Gagon

Paul Oldham

Will Oldham

Peter Townsend

Recorded by Paul Oldham

Mixed with Colin Gagon and David Pajo

Mastered by Conrad Strauss

Episode Credits:

Intro/Outro Music:

“Secret Life” by Generifus from the album, Rearrangel

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam