On accepting a creative challenge

Historically you’ve made records sans producers. What made David Ferguson the right person to slot into that role on The Purple Bird, the new Bonnie “Prince” Billy album?

The big one is the length of our friendship, professional relationship, and my relationship with where he is. He lives in Goodlettsville [Tennessee]. We tracked in Nashville and mixed in Goodlettsville, at his place. My relationship to place is very important when it comes to life and work. Beginning with the blatantly titled, I Made a Place, I’ve felt it’s a good idea to make records in Louisville, Kentucky and with people who are in Louisville, for many reasons. In terms of continuity, in terms of moving forward and looking back, and in terms of recognizing and respecting the relationships that exist with audience members, the relationships that could potentially exist.

Ferg is an extension of the place that I understand Nashville to be because of the kinds of friends that I have or have had there, some of whom have moved away, some of whom have died. It’s still mythologically a really important musical city and Ferg’s professional life has been spent there. When it comes to music, he’s a man of high standards, a human being of high standards. He has nurtured a community over the years of musicians and writers that he finds to be supernaturally talented as well as a joy to be around, at least for a few hours a day every once in a while.

It was an unspeakable honor that he instigated each step of The Purple Bird, beginning with collaborative writing sessions. Ferg’s access to musical wealth is immense, and I’m always overjoyed with whatever he shares. He shares generously but sparingly, if that’s not too much of a contradiction. If he sends me a text with a song he thinks I would like—which happens about once every three years—it’s a little gift from heaven because it’s packed with all kinds of information. Why did he share this with me? What did he like about it? His desire to get into collaborative situations with me was breathtaking.

Did you have to establish that trust and friendship with the other players? Or was it already there because Ferg was at the helm?

I was aware that a challenge was being thrown down. I didn’t know how I would respond to that challenge. At the same time, at every step I felt that I was up to the challenge, and Ferg probably wouldn’t have thrown down the challenges if he didn’t think that I was up to them. This wasn’t about, “Don’t feel bad about yourself, Will. You can do this.” It wasn’t that at all. It was that we’d spent enough time together that he thought, “This guy Will, he’s ready to play.” And he put me on the team.

As a teacher, there’s a delicate balance of setting high standards for students, but also meeting them where they’re at.

I know I’ve made the mistake of thinking someone was ready to do work that they weren’t ready for, and vice versa. It’s about recognizing that you don’t want to be the agent of a situation in which you or anybody else feels shame, frustration, or failure because you weren’t paying enough attention or were being overly optimistic. What age do you work with?

High school.

You’re creating their roadmap for understanding all existence. You don’t want to be the person of authority and experience who puts somebody in a position to fail. It’s not worth it unless you are willing to somehow make up for it, and you may not have time to make up for it… I’ve been in situations where I am, for whatever reason, experientially, creatively, or even actually incapable of fulfilling what’s been asked of me. Those are very confusing, potentially painful, and destructive situations.

Ferg doesn’t want to be involved with negativity if he can help it. He’s smart and wise enough to get involved with situations that aren’t going to spew out a lot of negativity. I knew that going in. I do get tired of talking about this, but the beginning of our relationship was a similar situation: the Johnny Cash recording session where Ferg was the engineer. It was an unspoken question, but the big question on the table in that room that day was, “Are you capable of just working with this artist Johnny Cash? Are you capable of just working with him?” Not bullshitting and throwing a lot of self doubt in there, not fucking up, but just being present. Do you have the answers that will be asked? Do you have the musical abilities to get through this small but significant task of getting through this song? This is sort of an extension of that, 20 some years later, where Ferg puts me in the room with Pat McLaughlin right away and thinks it will work. We come out with a song, “Boise, Idaho,” that we’re all kind of elated by.

What did these songwriting sessions look and feel like?

[Playing a show,] when you go to sound check, everybody sets up, and you’re waiting for the front-of-house person to say, “Okay, could I get your stage-right vocal please?” That’s when you know things have begun. Until then, you can be tuning, running a song, talking to your family on the phone. Anything. In these songwriting sessions, there is nobody. It’s this “hand of god” kind of thing that was magnificent to witness. You realize as a self-employed, creative kind of person that there isn’t anybody, almost any time, who is guiding me in what I’m supposed to do. If I had a manager, maybe. If I worked with a major label, perhaps. Or if I had what passes for a producer in most recording situations, again, maybe.

In this instance, I have to understand how to make a record. I have to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Here we are in these writing sessions with no mommy or daddy saying, “Do this.” [Instead it’s like,] “Okay, you’ve all been doing this for decades now, so just do it.” [The other musicians] had been in this situation many times before. I hadn’t been in that situation before. It was always at least two people with the experience and one person without the experience: me.

The way that Ferg makes records makes absolute sense to me and to everybody involved: the songwriters and all the session players, and Sean Sullivan, who was the chief engineer. We are privileged to get in the room with other people who want to use their minds to create a song and recording. People who want to use their skills and their experience to make something that is… I want to use words like “natural,” although it’s not fair to people for whom maybe a digital workspace is a natural extension of their creative life. It isn’t for me, and it isn’t for any of these people. What they like to do is be in the room with people, feel the energy, exchange ideas, exchange the energy—and that’s what they call making music. That’s what I call making music. I don’t connect with tuned and edited music. It just doesn’t work for me.

Working with an entire team of musicians who all cut their teeth in a pre-digital landscape must have made a big impact.

I’m convinced the record is imbued with this elevated spirit of hope and joy because of the hope and joy inherent in the experience of making the record itself. That comes from these musicians figuring out incredible ways of bringing a song to life that can be then shared with an audience. Progress and technological development gets in the way of that and subverts or contradicts what they know in terms of determining a good way to do something. What’s happened in music—as well as virtually every other field of human endeavor—is that people see the end result and don’t even think about reverse engineering it. They think, “How can I get something that sounds like that?” And then they go for it, not realizing that the sound is the end of complex processes.

To pick just an obvious one: Auto-Tune. All due respect to Auto-Tune; Auto-Tune can be great. I’m not trying to diss Auto-Tune or people who use Auto-Tune. But the main reason Auto-Tune is around is so that people don’t have to do the work to sing in tune. So people will seem like they’re better singers than they are. Ultimately that means we end up getting potentially weaker songs, weaker recordings, weaker music, because we’re not listening to things that people struggled to make. That’s the sustenance that we get from our music. Just like how the sustenance we get from our food is not because it resembles food, it’s because it is food. I think we are experiencing that culturally as well… There are long-term effects of people consuming things that are not what they resemble.

Tell me about your relationship to your singing voice and how it’s changed over time.

I won’t go so far as to be ashamed and embarrassed when I listen to recordings of my voice from 30 years ago. At the same time, I am often completely shocked at what I hear. I have a lot of mixed feelings about whatever the human entity known as Bob Dylan is. As a kid, I was taught, or you always read, “Oh, he’s a terrible singer.” I found myself constantly and consistently moved by many of his on-record vocal performances. I’m thinking, “I don’t understand. What do they mean he’s a terrible singer? Or that Leonard Cohen is a terrible singer? Or Daniel Johnston?” He maybe didn’t have the technical voice where people would say he’s a great singer, but he was very, very powerful. You knew what he was going for; it resonated with you as a listener.

I always had good intentions with my singing, and I always knew what I wanted to sing. I could to use my voice to its maximum potential. That means after years and years and years that I have, I think, greater ability to communicate and express than I did in my twenties. The desire was there and I would record songs and perform them. There are some people who develop or evolve or “progress” into a technical capacity that might not end up serving the music, or at least the relationship between the audience and the music. I appreciate hearing the complexities of the artists whose work I take in. The complexities include periodic failures, experimentation, and good-hearted attempts at doing something.

The record is one of the most joyful, hopeful pieces of music I’ve heard in a long time. What else is bringing you hope?

We do have this six-year-old who brings us a lot of hope and joy every day. She is remarkable. And this is my spot where I sit and work on songs. Outside of the window at this time of year, I can see two red-tailed hawks’ nests. In a month or two, I will see the hatchlings start to learn to fly. That makes me very happy seeing these hawks, and the barred owl has just moved back into the neighborhood for the year. They’ll be making all sorts of obscene noises for the next seven or eight months. These are great things.