Album review
Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You might seem like an ominous title for an album of such simple, homespun beauty. The quiet domesticity that permeated Will Oldham’s last solo album as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, 2019’s I Made a Place, can be heard at the root of the new songs, but they wear their lessons with proud and penetrating ease, less prone to guard and puzzle. They’re bare-bones, soft, and raw even when embellished by strings, horns, and backing vocals, taking their time to unwind slowly, as if to exist this way is our only salvation against destructive forces both beyond and very much in our control. The songs on Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You have no choice but to live in an apocalypse, but in the you there also lives an us: if I share these and you pass them around, we might make something of our doomed time. After untangling a series of plain and universal truths – everyone laughs, everyone cries, everyone dies – the opener ‘Like It or Not’ arrives at a proclamation that’s ridiculously bold and idiosyncratic: “Brace yourself for ecstatic eruption from the volcanic core of your heart.”
On the next song, however, ‘Behold! Be Held!’, he immediately offers a sincere interpretation of how this manifests in his own life: “I want to make music all the time, not just in fits and skirmishes.” Though he’s kept busy with a couple of collaborative releases, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy is up there with Oldham’s most inspired and focused work, in part due to its personal nature. It contains a wellspring of wisdom that won’t surprise longtime listeners, but it’s generous with it in a way that would make anyone feel welcome. And whether you hear more melancholy or joy in it (I lean towards the latter), Oldham allows himself to go a bit mad with it, not quite abandoning the surrealism that marked his earlier releases. “Here we’ll tell you privately the methods we employ,” the protagonists of ‘Queens of Sorrow’ announce: “We vaccinate with hardship and destroy/ Destroy the thought that sadness is a stultifying force/ Or that fear or madness could be a qualifying horse/ In the race for true fulfillment in life’s wild and winding course.”
His advice – sometimes complex, often innocent, always memorable – cheekily comes alive in the ding dongs of ‘Crazy Blue Bells’, the oops of ‘Kentucky Is Water’, and of course ‘Bananas’, a duet with Dane Waters in which the singer delights in the titular word like it’s the only one that could possibly fit this bond, which could be old or new, “in an end-of-times ballet.” It marries play and romance and sex like they’ve heard no other song achieve such a feat, even though Oldham himself has more than a few in this vein. Although the album is nakedly moving and nearly didactic, its logic is still strange and unconventional, like the string of b words that lend its opening stretch an unfettered confidence. Or take the pairing of ‘Willow, Pine and Oak’ and ‘The Trees of Hell’: one is a lovely tune using nature as a lens through which to appraise different human qualities, while the latter personifies trees with a kind of doleful ecological anxiety. What nature tells us about humanity can be a beautiful thing, but it can also, in the same breath, be a story of violence and destruction that weakens our faith in it.
“Maybe somewhat purged I’ll be by making up this song,” Oldham sings at the end of ‘The Trees of Hell’, but there’s something vivifying, too, about how quietly communal the songs are. Waters’ backing vocals throughout make them feel more like a warm embrace, while the viola and violin arrangements on a song like ‘Crazy Blue Bells’ punctuate its heartwarming message: “Someday, when there’s time to sing, a few of us may gather/ And raise a voice to anything because everything matters.” At times, the apocalyptic absurdity of Oldham’s songs might frame them as fantastical tales, but these voices join him so presently that the things he values – family and community in particular – don’t feel like imagined constructs. And when he sings of them, “courageous and careful and loving our now,” the part of the brain responsible for language, the thing he wields so brilliantly, briefly shuts down, and he can only exclaim: wow.
