Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the singer-songwriter and sometimes actor otherwise known as Will Oldham, has announced he’s releasing a new album I Made A Place.
The new album will be out November 15, but Oldham released the first single and video “At The Back of the Pit” on Tuesday morning. The clip was directed by Jacob Forman, who, according to Drag City’s site, is a high school senior. It shows Oldham dressed like a new wave cowboy with heavily smudged eyeliner and his band members wearing animal masks while playing their instruments out on a ranch somewhere in big sky country.
“In recent years, the whole world of recorded music, in the way that such music is conceived, perceived, recorded, released and distributed, has been atomized. I tried holding my breath, waiting for the storm to pass, but this storm is here to stay and its devastation is our new landscape,” Oldham said in a statement about I Made a Place. “What else is a person to do except what he knows and feels, which for me is making records built out of songs intended for the intimate listening experiences of wonderful strangers who share something spiritually and musically? I started working on these songs thinking that there was no way I was going to finish them and record and release them. This was a constructive frame-of-mind that protected the songs until this frightening moment when we let go of them and give them to you.”
Although Oldham has been busy over the years releasing albums of covers of artists like Merle Haggard and collaborating with the likes the The National’s Bryce Dessner, I Made a Place is Oldham’s first album of new Bonnie “Prince” Billy songs since 2011’s Wolfroy Goes to Town.
Watch the video for “At The Back of the Pit” above. I Made a Place can be pre-ordered here.
