Hello Sorrow Hello Joy

When depraved folk troubadour Will Oldham (aka Bonnie Prince Billy) collected several decades of song lyrics in the form of his 2018 book Songs of Love and Horror, Three Queens In Mourning was put together as a backing band for the ensuing tour. Made up of Oldham friends and collaborators Alasdair Roberts, Jill OSullivan, and Alex Neilson, the band learned select favorites from Oldhams extensive catalog and helped illustrate just how foundational a figure in American songwriting hed grown to be over the years. Hello Sorrow Hello Joy is a strange continuation of that tribute, with Three Queens In Mourning covering 12 of Oldhams best-known or most-loved tunes and Bonnie Prince Billy himself filling out the release with three covers and one original. Oldhams songs have roots in U.K. and American folk music, twisting traditional melodies around dark lyrics and delivering them with a nontraditional singing voice. His distinctive voice is a huge part of his music, and hearing his songs sung by restrained, harmonizing Scottish voices highlights the songs traditional folk elements. Reworked Appalachian melodies of tunes like Ohio River Boat Song and Trudy Dies sound more old-fashioned and bookish where the originals were creaky and painfully melancholy. OSullivans bounding violin and Neilsons shuffling drums make some of Oldhams most depressive songs feel almost peppy. The set list is largely well-known tunes like I See a Darkness and New Partner, but it also gets into more obscure selections. Particularly beautiful is the brief Christmas Time in the Mountains, a tune from an early Palace EP that communicates love, anger, and acceptance in its 74-second running time. Three Queens In Mournings dutiful covers are graceful and reverent, and taken on their own they amount to a sweet tribute to Oldhams weighty songwriting. The addition of four tracks from Oldham himself disrupts the flow in a couple of ways. After an albums worth of cover renditions of his songs, hearing the genuine artifact is a little jarring. The concept is solid -- Three Queens In Mourning covers Oldham, and Oldham offers up covers of songs written by each of the bands three members and one original -- but when Oldhams voice glides in on his rendering of Roberts Coral & Tar, he makes the song his own instantly. Even though he only shows up for a quarter of the album, the huge arrangements of Oldhams cover material and his unmistakable voice are almost distracting from the staid, pastoral readings of his songs that Three Queens In Mourning have just finished presenting. Hello Sorrow Hello Joy is an interesting addition to Oldhams never-ending body of work. Like almost everything else connected to him, its beautiful, strange, and a little unsettling in equal shares. ~ Fred Thomas