Bonnie King Billy

Bonnie "Prince" Billy: "Pussyfooting"
He takes a Dylan drink; he takes a Warhol drink. What a character Oldham still is. I mean, he wrote an article for The Guardian a few months ago in which he bemoaned how his ward/persona, B"P"B, has wantonly usurped his career! But let's talk about you: If you ever get locked inside a Best Buy one night, you could do a Richard-Pryor-in-Superman-3 job on the alarm, fire up a router and a laptop, bust open a CD-R, connect to a file-sharing service, and burn yourself a six- or seven-song EP of Will Oldham's "electronic" work to commemorate your awkward evening. You'd notice that, except for an odd experiment with David Pajo, all of Oldham's machine-driven songs are "covers," either of others' songs, or of his own work, or of others' poems. "Pussyfooting", alas, is no ankle-fetishist's ballad, but a semi-straight tiptoe through Mariah Carey's "Can't Take That Away (Mariah's Theme)", which was a Whitney Houston rip anyway.

Oldham has a soft spot for forcing funny drum machines to sober up, reckon, because despite these beats' woofer-potential, they maintain a dopey stiffness reminiscent of his 1996 Arise Therefore "drums" (which were credited to the Mayatone machine as if it were a band member, Maya Tone). My crap-synth-dependent college band sent Oldham a sampler back when he started Palace Records, and the response note asked twice what machine was used to make the drums. Point being: If you want to make your own version of this song, just amble over to the hit music section of the Best Buy and puncture a copy of Mariah Carey's 1999 Rainbow (featuring Starsky & Hutch's irascible Snoop Dogg, and a version of that Postal Service classic "Against All Odds"). Play the disc on a wall of speakers, trot to the section where the store keeps a few keyboards handy, and finesse the jam. Be sure to program the kitschiest mechanized strings and bass available. Mumble the verses, and you've almost got it, except for the Ween-esque live guitar solo, and, uh, Oldham's feathery and sweet multi-tracked chorus.

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