Review: Bonnie Prince Billy – We Are Together Again

Bonnie Prince Billy
We Are Together Again
No Quarter
Street: 03.06.2026
Bonnie Prince Billy = Bob Weir + Beck + Cat Stevens

Will Oldham, singing under the moniker Bonnie Prince Billy, is a cool summer breeze, or that smell after it rains. He’s yacht rock if the yacht was built by Huck Finn and floating down the slow muddy Mississippi in the summer heat. Oldham writes soft quiet songs that sound like old friends. He writes songs about the absurdity of things, songs that lure you in and bite with sharpened teeth. 

For his 31st album We Are Together Again Oldham returns to one of the sites the Mississippi runs through — his hometown of Louisville Kentucky. On this new record Oldham has surrounded himself with a great lineup of musicians including his brother Ned Oldham, who joins his brother for the first time in two decades. Tory Fisher, Lacey Guthrie and Kate Peabody from the Louisville band Duchess provide backing vocals with an elegant and graceful touch in the way Emmylou Harris floated in and out on Bob Dylan’s Desire album, adding substance and depth. Everyone is at the top of their game and Oldham knits it all together like a beautiful complicated web.

“Why does the lion still tear at our legs? / How can she still have such hunger?” Oldham asks on the two tracks: “Why is the Lion” and “Bride of the Lion,” Two tracks that bookend this record. Oldham sings about the terror and fear that we keep outside and closing ourselves in, fear that we need to scour ourselves clean — “Leaving us sparkling and bright.” Oldham sings about the deceit that fear brings and love is the retreat that brings us right back: “I love you, I love you, forever tonight / And I’ll love you forever you’ll learn.” 

Oldham also asks on both tracks: “Is it my voice? / Or better yet ours.” Oldham is hoping it’s not just him stepping back into a more loving space, hoping it’s universal in all of us. That’s the theme of Will Oldham and Bonnie Prince Billy. That’s especially been the theme of the last two Bonnie Prince Billy records: Here The Children Sing and The Purple Bird with songs about love, family connection and tapping the absurdities down to try and make it a safe place to live in for everyone.

One of the most beautiful songs in the Will Oldham/ Bonnie Prince Billy canon is the song “Vietnam Sunshine.” It’s a spring flower that blossoms out with mariachi horns and stunning backup singing by Catherine Irving. Oldham is calm, comfortable, collected and a bit playful singing gorgeous candy-colored lyrics that go down like a hit of dopamine on a carousel amusement park ride: “You are my sunshine / You fill my life with wild surprise / You rush and gush through the cracks in my everything / To my infinite delight / You outshine every wild explosion in the night.” It’s sublime and perfect.

“Oh, and strange tastes like trouble, and trouble tastes like strange / Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut / And please stay away from danger,” sings Oldham on the track “Strange Trouble” in a time with danger all around and people talking about everything and nothing at all. Sometimes in these times all you need is one friend. Oldham has that friend on the track “Everybody’s Got A Friend Named Joe,” a song about that one person that centers you, “someone to tell your dreams to when there’s nowhere else to go / Someone who’ll say that you’re ok, when for reals, you just don’t know.”

In his multitudes, Oldham contains a little Grateful Dead/Bob Weir Americana likability, with a little of Cat Stevens’ sugar-sweet storytelling and a touch of Beck-like troubadour weirdness. The formula has always worked for him. Oldham is what we need at this bend in time, at the crest of a wild wave that is about to crush back down and slide across a familiar beach where things calm and rest on the sun-soaked sand. Oldham has once again proven that he is an infinite delight. We Are Together Again is an album of joyful noise that our present needs. —Russ Holsten

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