Column | Quirky singer – NRC

There I was in Paradiso, on a warm summer evening. I expected a half -filled room, but it was packed, the audience was already in the back of the room. I squeezed a place aside, thanks to my height I could always see reasonably well.

What celebrity did we wait for? It was not a celebrity at all – that made this turnout so striking. I looked around, the audience was not ‘beep’, but certainly not ‘stick’, like me. The average age had to be between thirty and forty. We all came for a charismal, heavily balding 55-year-old man who was called Will Oldham, but had chosen the artist name Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy after he had released his first albums under other names-Palace, Palace, Brothers and Palace Music.

Some artists make it harder than necessary if they want to make a name for themselves. He himself thought that every music style heard a different name. In my experience, he has mainly opted for a quirky kind of mixture of melancholic country and folk music, often beautiful in melody, sometimes also with extremely afterruming texts. That gives some of his better songs a certain oppression, as if you are listening to someone who is desperately struggling with his life.

The first song I heard from him in 1994 was You will miss me when I burn. That title alone! It seems like a somewhat monotonous song, yet it grabs you by the throat with rules such as: ‘When you have no one/ no one can hurt you (…) will you miss me when I burn/ and will you eye with a lunging. ‘

He dared. I had not yet heard such a thing in pop music. From that experience I kept an eye on him. His albums changed quality, but there were always excellent songs in their own intimate, introverted style, very related to Leonard Cohen and Neil Young.

In the nineties he made his gloomy song, an important song for him that he also sang in Paradiso: I see a Darkness. In it he asks a good friend or who realizes how depressed he can be behind his external cheerfulness: ‘Come blacking in my mind/ and that I see a darkness’. Maybe his friend wants to save him, he asks.

His work later became less melancholy, as his latest album shows The Purple Bird. In a big interview in de Volkskrant He told Gijsbert Kamer that ‘everything’ changed for him when he became the father of a now six -year -old daughter. I saw him elsewhere in a photo with a beautiful, young woman. Apparently there was some more light in Darkness come.

It was also apparent from his strong concert in Paradiso. He performed with a great band with two blazers and a drummer, for two hours he alternated, well with voice, silent songs with tidy rock until the crazy audience breathed in the stuffy space. A few boys fainted around me, extra reason for me to stay upright with the recklessness.

He used to perform a lot on his gloomy one. I have not been there, unfortunately, because I have often noticed that you can also be cheerfully cheerful from gloomy music.

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