Bonnie 'Prince' Billy commits to the country craft on The Purple Bird

2007’s Greatest Palace Music featured highlights from Oldham’s formative gothic folk offerings under the Palace Music banner reimagined by some of the sharpest session musicians America’s country music capital has to offer.

Whereas that project could resemble the outcome of a dare to produce a particularly unlikely addition to endlessly prolific Oldham’s sprawling catalogue, The Purple Bird lands like a proper ‘Nashville album’. Produced and largely cowritten by David ‘Ferg’ Ferguson (whom Oldham met when Johnny Cash covered his doom-laden evergreen "I See a Darkness" 20-odd years ago), and featuring a handful of notable country veteran guests (who also pitch in on the songwriting), the album cheerily embraces various stock tropes and scenarios of country songs past and present (tipsily shabby drinking song? Check. Woebegone weepie named after a US town? Check. Longing and cheating? Check. Song written around a commonplace phrase? check). There’s also a commitment to the craft that has propelled many a country classic: rather than waiting around for divine inspiration to strike, Oldham and collaborators would meet at designated times for scheduled writing sessions, armed with little more than their instrument, ideas and pen and paper.

Although Oldham and co. wisely sidestep the most excessively lavish Nashville decorations (there are no gloopy strings, choirs, excessive fiddling or perhaps surprisingly even pedal steel here) and stick to the rootsier and more organic ends of the endlessly mutable country idiom, these rich but economic arrangements can sound almost indecently lavish after the extemporaneous kitchen table folk picking of 2023’s Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You.

There are tunes here that could easily pass off as vintage standards. The beautifully bruised doubt and confusion of "Boise, Idaho" (hints of Guy Clark, maybe) packs a, well, country song’s worth of tears and regret, while the closing secular hymn "Our Home" sounds like it could have been lurking around since the glory days of country music mecca Grand Ole Opry (situated in Nashville, obviously). The homebound drunkard’s lament "Tonight With The Dogs I’m Sleeping" teeters giddily on the edge of corniness, but the brisk rural funk of the execution is fit to silence dissenting. You may well wish for more of the depth, ambiguity and melodic yearning of "London May" when faced with the oompah-style moral parable "Guns Are For Cowards", however.

Executed with palpable warmth and affection for the musical heritage that hovers behind these songs, what could have been an unconvincingly superficial genre exercise emerges as another winningly inviting Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album.