Just over a year after 2025’s The Purple Bird, but from parallel recording sessions and familiar co-musicians, the veteran Louisville-Kentucky singer-songwriter Will Oldham returns with another collection of exquisite, intimate, gently defiant lo-fi folk to troubled times, an ode to community with a beautiful array of acoustic instruments and his poignant, insightful lyrics and delivery. With orchestral strings and woodwind colouring the acoustic guitar, its broad themes are how fear and a changing world can be met with harmony by the stubborn miracle of community, and so long as there are voices asking together, the asking itself becomes hope. Made closer to the Ohio River than any he has worked on since the 1993 Palace Brothers There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You, this LP involves Catherine Irwin, who sang on Ease Down the Road, returning here on Hey Little and Vietnam Sunshine. Lacey Guthrie, Tory Fisher and Katie Peabody, the three frontwomen of the band Duchess, sing together on the bookending ‘Lion’ songs – the fear-defying openerWhy Is The Lion and closer Bride of the Lion. It’s a release studded by gorgeous stillness and stirring melodies, from that opener to the nagging, disturbing, sometimes violent threats to daily peace of mind within the single They Keep Trying To Find You, fear of change in Strange Trouble to Life Is Scary Horses (one that Oldham describes as a “spiritual cover” of the Sally Timms / Jon Langford composition Horses: “Life is scary we are scared / We've arrived here unprepared / Things are changing, we are learning / Though many scary things don't change … The human times have come and gone/ We must accept our rule is done / Though love is sown and will live on.”
(Everybody’s Got) A friend named Joe is a tender number about a helpful neighbour who helps the narrator too terrified to leave his house. The uplifting Vietnam Sunshine has beautiful Mexican-style brass accompaniment, while a real standout, Hey Little, is a tender loving ode to a daughter. Shadows accompany light throughout this album. The dark but extremely beautiful Davey Dead tells of a tragic, troubled figure’s demise in a nightclub, the pin-drop quiet of The Children Are Sick highlights sorely needed help from a neighbour, before closer Bride of The Lion, with beautiful vocal backing, returns to the fear and trauma within that lion metaphor, but also a feeling that love can overcome it. Another gem from an enduring talent - profound, poetic and beautiful. Out on Domino Records/ No Quarter.
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