bonnie prince billy keeping secrets will destroy you

DC890

Release Date: August 11, 2023

People, let’s us talk about an album. Bonnie Prince Billy has made a number of them, and heard a bunch more in his time of knowing. He’s found them hewn from moments, admired them as small and accountable the communication of music in emotion, release and catharsis; to edify, to entertain, in two sides and less than an hour. There’s room for albums in everyone’s home, and there’s a place for everyone to listen or space for just one person at a time, when privacy is needed.

Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You presents simply an album made as it was meant to be heard, in a room. The sound of people together a sound we’d so recently feared that we’d lost – playing, communing, strings and wood and keys and voices singing. In the starkness of space, the complexities of life and time are unfurled, then refurled again. As strings ebb and flow with voices and their words, careful hands unwrap the gift of paradox in its many forms and rewrap, for regifting. For giving to everyone.

Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You presents simply, and is sung along easily and happily with in time BUT

Is it family portrait or fairy tale? How does it think the world was made, and will end?

Get your head unstuck from beyond your thighs and up your crack; find it out for yourself. This is an album. Its business is directing music and commentary your way. If you care about anything and you care to listen, you might like some things on this record. Like, for instance

Time: a killer, like its buddies, love, light, and sound.

Justice: everyone smiles to see it done.

Corporations: sing them down together, don’t let them divide.

Trees: as a way of seeing people (“Willow, Pine and Oak” ) and then, suddenly, as a nightmarish force of vengeance cast against mankind (“THE TREES OF HELL” ).

Family: an inexorable font of life and love and death; mothers, fathers and sons and daughters of all kinds, a gift that grows in all its forms.

Bananas: it is. It really is.

And ever so much more so. This record, you might could call it a bastard child of Master and Everyone and The Letting Go. You might say lots of things. But it you can’t say this ain’t a record that sings and dances, repeatedly, through moments of joy and ter-

LP/CD/CS

Track Listing

Like It or Not

Behold! Be Held!

Bananas

Blood of the Wine

Sing Them Down Together

Kentucky is Water

Willow, Pine and Oak Trees of Hell

Rise and Rule (She Was Born in Honolulu)

Queens of Sorrow

Crazy Blue Bells

Good Morning, Popocatépetl ror and together. An album bold enough to roll in the fearsome waves of Makapu’u. Diluting, with ease of expression, the presence of toxic knowledge. Separating chaff from wheat, free of the unneeded gravity of psycho-emotional investment. Aching to do what needs to be done.

Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You was recorded in Louisville by Nick Roeder, featuring Sara Louise Callaway on violin, Kendall Carter on keys, Elisabeth Fuchsia on viola and violin, Dave Howard on mandolin, Drew Miller on saxophone and Dane Waters’ voice. The presence of so many local educators in the band (Sara Louise runs the Louisville Academy of Music, Kendall is the director of music at his Louisville church, Dave runs the Louisville Folk School and Dane is a music educator as well) lends not only to a flow of moments so fluidly encompassing a wide range of musics from classical to traditional Hawaiian and elsewhere, but perhaps even more importantly, to the sense of community, heredity and the triumph of inheritance that is the marrow and life blood of this music.

People and the world, so beautiful and terrible. So much to love and to not like. In the living, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You enables Bonnie to let it all out, to let go again, and suggest to us all that we get while the getting is good.

“He seems to be building his own American songbook in the pursuit of a robust, whole song for the people.”

“[his] music generally plays around with ancient revered forms of folk and country music that most devotees treat with scholarly solemnity and yet some of his best songs are about getting a blowjob in public, or wishing a shark would eat you. [He has also written] maybe the most comforting song about the apocalypse

I’ve ever heard.”

Stereogum

“[He] is, for all his oddity, a deeply human songwriter. He unpacks the darkest and brightest parts of life with an unblinking candor.”

Slant

“..his way with words and his otherworldly voice, which can sound simultaneously youthful and ancient, have gradually won him a fiercely devoted fan base”

Rolling Stone

SUMMER & FALL 2023 TOUR DATES

“[His] albums, EPs, live releases and collaborations all bear the marks of deep thought and hard labor, revealing an artist who works diligently to make everything sound natural. “

American Songwriter

“...the kind of wonderfully gifted and gently eccentric artist that one encounters all too rarely these days.”

Interview Magazine

INDIE EXCLUSIVE VINYL

Sel. #: NW5661

CONFIG: 1xLP, Gatefold, Marketing Sticker, 12-page booklet, Red Splatter Color Vinyl, Download link included in liner notes

UPC: 607396566112

Box Lot: 20 Count

Genre: Alternative, Indie Pop

STREET DATE: Sept 16, 2022

STREET DATE: August 11, 2023

SIDE A: Here I Go Hit Man

Waiting Around Can’t Relax

Human Machines

Long Time Coming

SIDE B: Vast Sea

Blah Blah Blah

Degenerate Friends

Good Time Guy

Chasing Me Away

Hailing from Los Angeles with an arsenal of songs as varied as the American landscape itself, PJ WESTERN creates music of contradictions. His tripped out pop-rock psychedelia evokes a haze of 60’s AM radio as heard emanating from someone else’s car window. HERE I GO, Western’s debut album, recorded during the lockdown we all endured, was written in dreams. In visions. Wild but refined, classic but modern. The album is a lot like the man who wrote it: complex, celebratory, grateful. Recorded in LA with the help of some of the finest musicians the city has to offer, HERE I GO offers a perspective of the city as heard through the ears of a precocious outsider – someone who may call the city home, but also can’t quite shake the suspicion he might not belong in the Hollywood Hills surrounding him.

STANDARD VINYL

Sel. #: NW5623

CONFIG: 1xLP, Gatefold, Marketing Sticker, 12-page booklet, Black Vinyl, Download link included in liner notes

UPC: 607396562312

Box Lot: 20 Count

Genre: Alternative, Indie Pop

CD

Sel. #: NW6530

CONFIG: Digiwallet, 16-page booklet, Marketing sticker

UPC: 607396653027

Box Lot: 30 Count

Genre:Alternative, Indie Pop

DC878

12”EP

Street Date: Feb. 24, 2023

It seems awhile ago, but it wasn’t –not in days and months...whatever time is. But in terms of phases –- we’ve been in and out of all kinds of bags since last summer, right? There’s the us before we heard the rest that 2022 had to offer, and then there’s us today. And coming on seven months later, fresh as it still is, “Hello, Hi” is disappearing in the rearview, like everything else that’s going down the road.

But July 2022, it was in the headlights, dead ahead. We weren’t there yet, we couldn’t know what it would mean, but we were excited to find out. And in L.A., with the release show at Teragram coming up, Ty and the Freedom Band were working and playing to get it together. There’d be a little acoustic set to open things up, which was something different, so a last minute show was drummed up, for Ty and Emmett to work it out in front of some people. And that kind of became the REAL record release show.

Word went out afternoon of the 21st

Tracks

–- free show tonight in Highland Park –- YEAH! A crowd showed up that evening and crammed in among the vintage clothes to hear some music and share some times. And most of us missed it! But nobody missed it quite like your present scribe did –- I went down, stopped in, said hi –- my lady-friend bought a hat –- and then we split, regretfully, a previous engagement to attend.

What suckers we were! This show clearly ruled, just hearing the five songs included here. With the incredible feelings of the crowd and the spontaneous play in the songs we now know from the album almost miraculously captured to tape (by the capturer himself, Mike Kreibel) at FULL WARMTH, none of us can say we missed it at all anymore –- drop the needle and you’re there, at the launching of sounds that added to the evolution of the world we’ve been living in ever since!

So that’s the story -- “Hello, Hi”, goodbye