Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s new live album Ghosts of American Psychonauts was recorded at The Pico Union Project in Los Angeles over Valentine’s Day weekend of 2025 – just a few weeks after the release of his album The Purple Bird and in the immediate wake of the devastating wildfires which had raged throughout Southern California for much of January.
Housed in the city’s oldest synagogue building, The Pico Union Project is a multi-faith cultural centre and community hub that hosts everything from farmers markets to art and cookery courses to concerts which are held in its 375-seat sanctuary-cum-theatre. That makes the venue an intimate space for a recording of this nature, with the artist Will Oldham saying of the occasion:
In February of 2025, in Los Angeles, we had stories to share with each other and we did it with a thorough and cathartic push-and-pull with each other, and with the audience. The sound of the record doesn’t make any sense, nor does its duration, by standard standards, and this allows the record to do what we want music to do which is to make its own sense. Once you’ve been on the road for years it’s undeniable that the road is also home, because that’s where much of our friends and family are. The stage and the audience were full of friends and family, and music is where we meet.
While his gaze remains flinty and his songwriting perspective trenchant yet skewed, much of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s recent work has turned in the direction of hearth and home, finding succour in family and the routines of domesticity, with human connection less about addled or bruised or some kind of gossamer dependency than about being dependable and forging those steadying bonds. At the same time his sonic palette has grown a little warmer. This change of tenor has been apparent since the apposite roominess of I Made a Place while Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You was folksy and spare even through its instrumental flourishes and The Purple Bird carried Oldham to Nashville where he worked with the producer David Ferguson to furnish his music with a full country sound.
Three songs from The Purple Bird appear on Ghosts of American Psychonauts with one from Keeping Secrets and one from I Made a Place. The others include the Noah’s Ark riff ‘Shorty’s Ark’ from the Matt Sweeney collaboration Superwolves, the curious and mossy ‘Strange Form of Life’ from The Letting Go and the title track from his classic album I See a Darkness which remains more than a quarter of a century later something of a signature piece. Each of the songs were substantially rearranged for their live performance.
Yet if the occasion and the broader circumstances of this live concert might lead you to expect a display of hearthside warmth and libatory bonhomie then Oldham and his troupe of collaborators instead present another kind of camaraderie, one more stark and with a suitably apocalyptic bent on their stirring rendition of ‘Trees of Hell’.
The original version of the song from Keeping Secrets opens through the splintering of a phantasmic orchestra, as what sounds like strings and brass erupt and blare like the horn of an oncoming train before settling down into a whirring drone. A few plaintive strums further stabilise the composition and after a moment Oldham’s intimate song begins, almost in spoken word as the drone becomes arcs of fiddle music twined by Sara Louise Callaway on the violin and Elisabeth Fuchsia on viola.
That viola steadily separates itself from the melodic line and recommences a low drone while Dave Howard plucks lullingly and plaintively his mandolin from the middle of the composition, adding an air of limpid but mournful pastoralism. Such folksy themes suit and adapt to the lyrics as Oldham unfolds a grim though dutiful tale of trees which ‘now surround us with their girth and with their might’, effectively taking some measure of revenge for all of our ill-treatment.
An ecological sensibility has infused his recent work, taking in for instance ‘Shorty’s Ark’ from Superwolves and especially ‘Downstream’ from The Purple Bird, culminating in We Are Together Again his latest studio album which finds him showcasing some of Louisville’s finest musicians while steering close to the Ohio River. ‘Trees of Hell’ is in the same stream but Oldham’s hushed delivery alongside the verdancy or mellowness of the mandolin turns the album version into something like a fairytale, less fiery denunciation than spore spell even if the song entails vetivery words of warning.
That’s not the case on this live reinterpretation from Ghosts of American Psychonauts. But let’s start with the footage itself as shot and edited by Brian Vernor, which captures the stage setting inside The Pico Union Project and the arrayed performers in beautifully elegant low-contrast black and white, whose tones blend together to give the image an almost sepia quality.
The effect is vintage or noirish and dreamy as Oldham tosses a wisecrack in the direction of the screenwriter and producer (and sometime musician) D.V. DeVincentis, who is apparently carrying something within the congregation or perhaps at the back of the theatre as Oldham advises ‘Slow D.V. slow! Pace it! You’re a flower girl’.
Oldham sits in the centre of the stage and appears to almost conduct or harness the performance through his theatrical hand gestures, encircling the congregation, summoning a swarm or throng and acting out some of the song’s lyrics or sweeping out his arms with dramatic flourish. At once these gestures seem to encourage the propulsions of his band and to hold the ripe energy of the performance at bay. He is flanked to his immediate right and left by his current touring partners Thomas Deakin on a down-tuned electric guitar and Jacob Duncan on alto saxophone. Ryder McNair – an acclaimed film composer and also the artist’s cousin – sits behind Deakin on keys while frequent Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy collaborator Emmett Kelly of The Cairo Gang and many more sits behind Duncan on the bass as London May once of Samhain rises behind the bandleader on the drum kit.
The original album version of ‘Trees of Hell’ features no percussion but is undergirded by those droning and wailing strings while Dave Howard’s mandolin plucks out a falling rhythm. Here instead guitar and drums establish a throbbing, lurching beat which Deakin will sustain and May elaborate over the course of the rendition. On the record it is Drew Miller’s saxophone which contributes to the brassy, windy texture of that opening horn or drone. Live as the padding beat announces itself and embeds the rhythm it is Duncan on the alto who sworls and screeches over the top before commencing a melody.
Soulful and bluesy yet somehow oily and slick, this theme recurs at staggered intervals accentuated by the keys and the bass, serving to enhance the groove while at the same time introducing a note of cacophony as each time the motif appears there is a sense of cars skidding out down moonlit avenues or highways. Oldham tugs as if to pull those girthy trees onto himself then expels the energy as he sings ‘Rhizomatic saplings take particular delight / In creeping ever closer, at hemming us all in / With inherent knowledge that the burning will begin’.
The song’s resonance in the wake of those devastating Los Angeles wildfires is therefore especially pronounced as Oldham with a sense of urgency expels lines about ‘gasping’ in the black air or with black rage while the band squeals to another climax. ‘My eyes they look for green in among the trees of hell’ he exhorts getting at the title image before landing on the refrain ‘Satan did a dance with me and I danced right along / Maybe somewhat purged I’ll be by making up this song’.
And as the drums clatter and cymbals splash Duncan with his caterwauling shakes and trills and shrill piercing overblowing is joined stage left by a couple of other dapper reedmen in D.V. DeVincentis on the tenor and Patrick Shiroishi who adds his distinctive alto to the mix. Oldham gets stuck in to the third verse, an explanatory passage as he states ‘The trees have come to take back what we took away from them / We yanked their roots, claimed their branches, pulled them limb from limb / We stole and violated all that would have been shared swift / ‘Cause we saw inherent harmony and assumed it was our gift’.
With the addition of those extra saxes, the band throbs and swells with a squawking, stygian multiplicity of clamorous voices. Kelly and McNair largely contribute to that grinding, intoxicating rhythm. There’s little letup now as Oldham gets to the pith of the violence, a sequence of vengeance as ‘One tree ripped my stomach out and one branch tore my eye out / Blowing leaves whipped and tore the skin from off my back’. As the implacable and monotonous beat implies, there is something cyclical here though not in the realm of vernal regeneration but with the sense that a fateful decision had been made and the consequences will continue to reverberate all the way down the line.
You reap what you sow in other words and with the final line Oldham confirms the timescale, singing that the trees ‘Made provisions for a sense of everlasting lack’ before one last go-around with that satanic chorus. ‘Trees of Hell’ as captured on Ghosts of American Psychonauts is scorching and spectral. The accompanying film is an impressive spectacle and we may wonder whether the retinue on stage are gathering horsemen of the apocalypse or fellow travellers or the trees themselves encircling Oldham as he self-immolates before our very eyes in one defiant or sacrificial act. Anyway his wild exhortation ends and the embers begin to swirl as a few last puffs through reeds carry us out.
