review

Record Review: “The Purple Bird” by Bonnie “Prince” Billy

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The Purple Bird by Bonnie “Prince” Billy released in 2025. Find album reviews, track lists, credits, awards and more at AllMusic.

Singer/songwriter Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy, has had an infatuation with traditional country music for the entirety of his career, and its influence has grown more pronounced at different phases of his discography.

Though his enigmatic persona is always present in his songs, some of Oldham’s most engaging tunes are those where he’s tempered his strangeness with the warm familiarity of classic country underpinnings. In 2004, his Greatest Palace Music collection took this approach into overdrive, re-recording new versions of some of his early outsider Americana songs in full Nashville regalia, with crack session players transforming the songs into traditional country and/or Western arrangements. The Purple Bird represents Oldham taking another swing at the time-honored Nashville sound.

Album producer David Ferguson (a longtime collaborator of Oldham’s who has also worked with Johnny Cash, Sturgil Simpson, and many other big names of country) co-wrote many of the songs, assembled a band, and connected a host of talented guests to bring the sessions to life. Ferguson’s hand on the album is best felt in its most lively moments, like the joyous “The Water’s Fine” with its chicken-scratch guitar leads and grinning fiddle parts or the timeless honky tonk bumble of “Tonight with the Dogs I’m Sleeping,” a hilarious drunkard’s lament that sees its flailing protagonist literally sleeping in the doghouse after a long night out. However, ballads like the beautifully melancholic “Boise, Idaho” and album standout “One of These Days (I’m Gonna Spend the Whole Night with You)” are just as powerful if more refined, both with gentle soft-rock melodic sensibilities that merge with dreamy pedal steel, electric piano, or mandolin augmentation to create an almost tropical take on the traditional country slow dance.

Oldham is the sole writer on several songs, including “Guns Are for Cowards,” which uses a buoyant and celebratory oompah instrumental as the backdrop for lyrics about horrific gun violence, the understated “Sometimes It’s Hard to Breathe,” and the horn-heavy mellowness of “New Water.” These songs are great, but they feel more in keeping with the sound of recent work like 2023’s Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You. The Purple Bird shines the brightest in its most collaborative moments. It’s when the band is in full swing that Oldham sounds tuned-in and excited (even giddy) to be crafting the kind of classic country record that he’s enjoyed so much himself.

The depth of the production helps deliver this feeling, elevating the sound of The Purple Bird to a place where all of its carefully placed details and rusty joy can be clearly heard, and even more markedly felt.

Source: The Purple Bird – Bonnie “Prince” Billy | Album | AllMusic

Review: Brigid Mae Power’s “Songs for You” 

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Brigid Mae Power

Brigid Mae Power’s ‘Songs for You’ is a timeless record filled with brilliant moments that will melt the heart of even the most cynically covers-album-averse listener.

By Thomas Blake

Recording a cover of any reasonably well-known song is always a balancing act. How do you make something new enough for it to be worth the effort without shattering the appeal of the original? A cover, as opposed to an interpretation of a traditional song, carries with it an implicit debt to someone else’s creativity, and a corresponding duty to honour that creativity. It’s tough to get right – the deluge of frankly appalling tribute acts that have flooded the live music scene in recent years is proof enough of that – but on the rare occasions it does work, it can seem like a kind of alchemy.

On Songs for You, Brigid Mae Power has mastered that alchemy. She served notice of her ability to make other people’s material her own with a wonderful version of Tim Buckley’s I Must Have Been Blind on her 2023 album Dream from the Deep Well, and a year later, she has gone all the way with an album of nine covers. All of them are songs loved by her late father, or those she listened to while caring for him, and it is that sense of care, perhaps, that permeates these songs, and gives them an appeal far more enduring than your average cover version.

Most of them are reasonably well-known songs from the country, folk, and folk-rock neck of the woods. The main exceptions are Television’s See No Evil, which loses its New York snarl and circular riff but gains in return a newly-framed melody and a quiet kind of positive energy, and closer You Don’t Know Me, a sweet soul-pop classic made famous by Ray Charles. Power stays true to the song’s melancholy sweetness and plays subtly on its country-soul leanings. It makes for a truly timeless performance.

And that timelessness is all over the album. Power’s take on Bert Jansch’s Fresh as a Sweet Sunday Morning unfolds with an easy languor that becomes spine-tinglingly beautiful, indeed almost uncanny, with repeated listens. She has a knack for taking songs that could easily become cloying in the wrong hands and making out of them something feather-light but emotionally rich. Country yodeler Slim Whitman’s Rose Marie is stripped back to its essentials and becomes a kind of brief, elemental lament. Missing You, a quite brilliant modern ballad of the Irish diaspora written by Jimmy MacCarthy but made famous by Christy Moore, floats with an ethereal beauty that makes the hardships it describes all the more poignant.

The nuanced, minimal instrumental backing is a crucial part of the album’s appeal. Angel Blood (a Cass McCombs song) is backed by Power’s hazy organ; the newest song on the album, its nostalgic shimmer helps it fit right in. Walk On Out of My Mind, taken from the Waylon Jennings version, has an easy percussive clop. Roy Orbison’s In Dreams is almost impossibly laid-back, before Power’s voice rises lark-clear over the gentle strum of acoustic guitar.

Neil Young’s Mellow My Mind might be the best of all. Here, Power has achieved the trick of making me think again about a song I thought I knew inside-out: I always saw Mellow My Mind as a largely innocuous track on Tonight’s The Night, an album which has never quite got to me in the way it gets to most Young fans. Hearing Power’s version, though, has made me think again. Her voice has a unique way of highlighting a melody, and here it grapples with Young’s downbeat, burned-out original and comes up with something jewel-like and light-dappled. It’s one of many brilliant moments on a record that will melt the heart of even the most cynically covers-album-averse listener.

Songs for You (20th December 2024) Self Released

Pre-Order the Digital and Vinyl: https://brigidmaepower.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-you

Source: Brigid Mae Power – Songs for You (Album Review) – KLOF Mag

How the ‘We Live In Time’ team got an original British romance into cinemas

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Directed by John Crowley, We Live In Time presents a love story where time is in short supply

By Charles Gant

When SunnyMarch commissioned playwright and screenwriter Nick Payne to adapt a book they had in development with Studio­canal, the UK production company might have been fazed by the creative pivot he eventually proposed. “He turned around one day and said, ‘Can I do something else? I’ve got a better idea, and I really, really want to do it.’”

SunnyMarch head of film Leah Clarke is relating the course of events that led to the creation of contemporary British romantic drama We Live In Time, scripted by Payne, directed by John Crowley (Brooklyn), produced by SunnyMarch in association with Shoebox, and starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh.

“We were delighted at the idea of Nick doing an original for us, especially something that was romantic and meaningful,” adds Clarke. SunnyMarch took the proposal back to Studiocanal, “and they were very gracious, and were up for it”.

That smooth course of events might seem surprising, given the current focus on adapting existing source material or biographical/historical subjects for the screen – which in Studiocanal’s case include recent hits Back To Black, Wicked Little Letters and The Outrun. And Clarke agrees it was hard to pitch comp titles for the film to Studio­canal and fellow backers A24 (which has North American rights) and Film4. She mentions Silver Linings Playbook and Blue Valentine.

“But those films are American, and that kind of indie [original romantic drama] space doesn’t really exist here [in the UK]. So the only way it was going to get made is if it had two big stars who had terrific chemistry.”

SunnyMarch’s next step was to attach a director, and it reached out to Crowley, director of Payne’s play The Same Deep Water As Me at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013. Payne is best known for play Constellations, which was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre in 2012 and offers a playful perspective on love while stirring in fizzy ideas about science and cosmology as well as a story­line involving terminal illness and assisted dying.

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BBC4 “Showbands”- an Irish cultural phenomenon explained

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By Veronica Lee, The Arts Desk

Ask most people what a showband is and they’ll give you a blank look. But ask any Irish person (or those born in the Irish diaspora) who is north of 50 and they will probably look misty-eyed. For between the late 1950s and 1980s showbands were a huge Irish cultural phenomenon, and Ardal O’Hanlon was our amiable guide through this brief but illuminating history of them.

Taking a break from his Caribbean sojourn in Death in Paradise, in Showbands: How Ireland Learned to Party O’Hanlon explained that Ireland in the 1960s was very different to the young, outward-looking country it is now – poor, mainly agricultural and rural, and living under the yoke of the Catholic Church. America had Elvis Presley, and the UK The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but none of these acts played Ireland’s small rural villages – and out of this musical vacuum came showbands, whose sets were a curious musical hybrid of covers of pop, country & western and traditional Irish ballads.

Showbands were distinct from the four-man beat combos elsewhere; they were larger for a start, typically numbering between six and eight: drums, guitars and brass, fronted by a lead singer who was usually the cutist-looking fellah. As O’Hanlon said: “They were versatile, hardworking mobile jukeboxes in shiny suits.”

O’Hanlan, who is from the border county of Monaghan in the Republic, got in a VW camper van to travel around the island of Ireland (showbands were a cross-cultural, cross-border phenomenon) to recreate the days when the musicians would chuck their instruments in the back and drive from gig to gig, six days a week. It was an unnecessary contrivance, as he spoke to his interviewees when they were both safely ensconced on sofas.

Initially, the bands played in church halls, managed by the local priest (who would measure the distance between couples to make sure the Holy Ghost would be able to fit between them), and where nothing stronger than soft drinks (“minerals” as the Irish have it) were served.

But pretty quickly promoters realised there was money to be made and commercial dance halls started springing up all over the place. At their peak, it is estimated there were more than 600 showbands working in Ireland – including the Royal Showband, the Miami Showband, Big Tom and the Mainliners, and Margo and the Keynotes – and they were household names, regularly pulling crowds of more than 1,000 people to ballrooms, six nights a week.

O’Hanlan spoke to several members of the best-known bands, who spoke with affection about their time on the road, not just in Ireland but in the UK too. Anywhere there was an Irish community there was a dance hall and many showbands were as popular here as back home. Some, like the Royals and the Miami, even went to Las Vegas, though with differing success.

O’Hanlon pointed out that showbands managed to work through the Troubles in Northern Ireland – their fans, from either side of the religious divide in Northern Ireland, didn’t care they were from the Republic. As Steve Travers of the Miami Showband said: “A showband is a perfect blueprint for integration,” while his bandmate Des Lee said: “We stayed away from politics. Our aim was to deliver two hours of entertainment.”

But then sectarianism did affect them. On 31 July 1975 when the Miami Showband were returning to Dublin late one night from a gig in County Down, a group of loyalist paramilitaries from the Ulster Volunteer Force attacked their van, killing three of the band. Some would read the attack as the beginning of the end for showbands, but in truth it was Ireland’s steps towards liberalising licensing laws – bars and hotels could now serve alcohol while live bands were playing, for instance – that did for them, as well as a new wave of emigration from Ireland’s rural areas, which took away much of the showbands’ fanbase.

There was little in the way of backstage gossip and it was a lot to run through, but O’Hanlon, with some excellent archive material and interesting reminiscences, made this an enjoyable hour.

Source: Showbands, BBC4 review – an Irish cultural phenomenon explained

Watch the complete BBC Four documentary