Will Oldham had been releasing music for a while by the time this was released in 1999, under a variety of different names. This is the title track of his first album under the name by which he is now best known, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. The album as a whole is a stone-cold classic, with the first half being one of the strongest run of songs of the decade. 'A Minor Place' and 'Nomadic Revelry', both fantastic songs in their own right, seem to be building up to an emotional climax, gradually gathering pace, until track 3 hits, when the volume completely drops off, any non-completely essential sound stops completely (an effect he also performs live). Oldham starts off by listing things he likes about life, but states that, even despite all these things, he can't help but see a 'darkness', which he can't save himself from. In the final chorus, he resigns himself to the fact he will probably always feel the same way, but it feels like he's putting this up as a good thing, rather than bad.
Even Johnny Cash's deathly voice couldn't really do the song justice, with his gravelly version, released about a decade ago on 'American III', coming across to me as fairly flippant, not really getting to the heart of the song. When a song can sound more sincere than even Johnny Cash in his own elderly darkness can manage, you know Will Oldham has put absolutely everything into it, and here he has written one of the best downbeat songs I've ever heard. It doesn't sound especially morbid, and while the lyrics themselves are bleak, they aren't off-the-scale - there is definitely a way of looking at the song's basic sentiment 'I'll always be depressed, and need my friends to help me through it' in a positive light, despite the sentiments expressed being, well, depressing. Every single time I listen to this song I come away thinking about it from a different viewpoint - in fact, it's one of those rare songs that you can't really recover from the mental toll of listening to, up there in the pantheon with 'Oh Comely' and 'Heroin'.
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - I See A Darkness
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