About this Artist

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Editorial Reviews

At last, a Will Oldham release for everyone. One of the indie underground's most idiosyncratic artists, Oldham has built up a catalogue of achingly poetic, rootsy rock songs that can be lonesome, creepy, winking, or anywhere in between. For Greatest Palace Music, he headed to Nashville to record new versions of old favorites. While his craggy voice remains the centerpiece, the arrangements are markedly different, with a cast of top-notch session players offering pedal steel, female harmonies, piano, fiddle, and mandolin to supplant the haunting, stripped-down early recordings. The loping ballad "Agnes, Queen of Sorrow," for example, was a spare, acoustic guitar-driven recording on the 1994 EP Hope, but here it's a transcendent duet buoyed by Mike Johnson's gorgeous pedal steel playing, Stuart Duncan's moaning fiddle, and Bruce Watkins's crisp acoustic guitar solo. Other songs are more thoroughly retrofitted: "Ohio River Boat Song," a dramatic dirge on Oldham's debut single from '93, is transformed into a richly arranged up-tempo number. Most striking of all is "Pushkin," an unsettling prayer backed by acoustic guitar on 1994's Days in the Wake, where Oldham weakly asserted, "God is the answer / God lies within," with only a trace of hope in its verity. Here it's a full-on country gospel number, with a rousing female chorus injection a dose of conviction to the same linke. Greatest Palace Music may not earn Will Oldham play on CMT anytime soon, but it reasserts the depth and artfulness of his largely under-recognized talents. Lydia Vanderloo, Barnes & Noble

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