Bonnie “Prince” Billy
We Are Together Again

However dimly we perceive it, we are living through a change of worlds. The one we were born into is slipping away, reshaped and denuded by human action. What remains is the question of what we will carry forward, and the manner in which we refuse to surrender ourselves. Will Oldham’s new album, We Are Together Again, feels like an answer to these questions. In Oldham’s songs - and in the circle of others who’ve gathered beneath the name Bonnie “Prince” Billy on this endeavor - friendship, community, and the stubborn joy of making art with others become a means of persistence. This isn’t to say that the record is a denial of collapse, which would be delusion, so much as that models defiance by remaining fully human, fully joyful, in a world with a diminishing horizon... I’m talking about Oldham’s record, to be sure, but I think the answers he suggests in We Are Together Again speak to the only meaningful choices any of us can make at this point in all of the agonizing everything. 

You can hear it in “Life Is Scary Horses,” when Oldham concedes, “The human times have come and gone.  We must accept our rule is done, though love is sown and will live on. Come to me, let me see your eyes once more before the winter comes again.” The song modulates from minor to major in tone, almost sunny. This could read as irony, but to my ear it’s something closer to grace. That’s the spirit running through We Are Together Again: not denial, but fragile endurance and thankfulness for the moments we have.

“Friend Named Joe” and “Davey Dead” form the emotional heart of the record. In the former, Oldham sings “And when it feels like life is just a series of delusions, Joe can show that, even though it all feels like illusion, it’s real; and yesterday bears no resemblance to tomorrow. You fly towards death so full of life and love and joy and sorrow.” And in the latter, “If you destroy a child’s perspective, here’s what that child will do: be faced with unrelenting trial and render terror back at you.” 

The album begins and ends with “Why is the Lion” and “Bride of the Lion,” which serve as thesis and conclusion, offering an invocation that seems to float above the rest of the work: “Hope of something beginning to rise from the floor of the ring…is it my voice, or, better yet, ours?” A melody cleaning the world, “scouring the filth from the light.” That’s what the album sounds like: people trying, not to fix anything, but to keep the light clear long enough to recognize each other in it.

The feeling of community is earned honestly since We Are Together Again is as much as gathering as a record or a statement. The studio becomes a meeting ground, a small republic of sound. Oldham’s friends, colleagues and even family— including — Tory Fisher, Lacey Guthrie, Katie Peabody, Catherine Irwin, Sally Timms, Maggie Halfman, Nuala Kennedy, Ned Oldham, Thomas Deakin, Jacob Duncan and Erin Hill  - lend their voices, turning solitude into shared witness.

A sense of human beauty runs through everything here. Each voice remains distinct, yet folds into something larger. We Are Together Again doesn’t resolve fear; it meets it with harmony. It’s a record about the stubborn miracle of accompaniment. It’s about how we keep asking, and how, so long as there are voices to ask together, the asking itself becomes a kind of hope.