Will Oldham is one prolific son of a bitch.
From a listener's standpoint, he's decidedly difficult to keep up with artistically -- much like a Ryan Adams or a Conor Oberst -- because he his constantly writing and releasing a wealth of music under various incarnations of himself: Will Oldham, Palace Brothers, Palace Music or Bonnie "Prince" Billy.
Nary a year has passed within the last decade and a half that the singer / songwriter hasn't put something out there -- a full length, an EP, a live album, a collaboration -- and, what's more impressive, it's all been worth ingesting.
Not a full three months into 2009 and we've got his latest "Beware," a record he wrote while he was an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, Calif.
His fruitful production is generous, yes, but it's easy to blur his boundaries and less so decipher that esoteric line where one record ends and another begins. And herein lies the beauty of the Bonnie Prince: he's earned our trust as his audience, so much so that individual albums don't matter so much so as the body of work as a whole.
This is what you get at a live performance; a virtually uninterrupted stream of consciousness that at times warbles and wanders, but always manages to regroup to tell a hell of a narrative.
Last night's Turner Hall performance was no exception and was further magnified by the intimate atmosphere the floor of tiny two-top tables adorned with flickering candles created.
Oldham is an animated character to watch and you get a sense -- through his wild hand gestures and physical interpretation of his songs -- that he's genuinely moved by his work and even the old stuff still excites him. Complemented by the energy of his backing band and fellow harmonizers, the performance was nothing if not powerhouse from start to finish.
His innate sense of craft allows him to experiment with song variations on stage -- a practice that, frankly, is sometimes subject to criticism from a devoted crowd -- and somehow make the live version even more welcoming than the familiar finish of recorded.
"Beware" opener "Beware Your Only Friend," for example, started sometime early in the evening with alternate lyrics and arrangement, then took an hour break and eventually reassembled during the encore to satisfy us with the original verse.
In that moment, it was if he'd never missed a beat. And neither had we.
OnMilwaukee.com staff writer Julie Lawrence grew up in Wauwatosa and has lived her whole life in the Milwaukee area.
As any “word nerd” can attest, you never know when inspiration will strike, so from a very early age Julie has rarely been seen sans pen and little notebook. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee it seemed only natural that she major in journalism. When OnMilwaukee.com offered her an avenue to combine her writing and the city she knows and loves in late 2004, she knew it was meant to be. Around the office, she answers to a plethora of nicknames, including “Lar,” (short for “Larry,” which is short for “Lawrence”) as well as the mysteriously-sourced “Bill Murray.”
