Bonnie "Prince" Billy

Will Oldham has recorded as Bonnie "Prince" Billy since 1998, after five years spent putting out hushed, ramshackle records under the names Palace, Palace Brothers, and Palace Music from his home base of Louisville, Kentucky. His voice, by turns creaky and startlingly clear, carries songs built on vintage folk and country bones, streaked with the plainspoken menace of gothic country and the frayed edges of lo-fi recording. 1999's I See a Darkness set the template and became a foundational text of American indie folk, later covered by Johnny Cash. Before he ever picked up a guitar, Oldham worked as a film actor, appearing as a teenager in John Sayles' Matewan, and that same instinct for character has shaped three decades of shape-shifting collaborations, from the spectral 2005 duet album Superwolf with guitarist Matt Sweeney to full-band reinventions of his own back catalog. Now in his fifties and still restlessly prolific, he moves between solo records cut in his own house and outside-producer sessions in Nashville without losing the raw, unvarnished quality that has defined his work since the start.