Bonnie “Prince” Billy has spent decades treating his songs less like finished objects than things that can be continually dismantled and rebuilt, and Ghosts of American Psychonauts is a particularly compelling example of that process. Recorded over two nights at Los Angeles’ Pico Union Project during Valentine’s Day weekend 2025, the eight-song live album revisits material from across Will Oldham’s catalog alongside three songs from 2025’s The Purple Bird. Rather than attempting to recreate the studio recordings, Oldham surrounds them with an unusually expansive ensemble featuring saxophones, flute, clarinet, piano, bass, drums and guitar. The result is a live album that often feels less like a document of a concert than a new interpretation of familiar material.
The The Purple Bird material immediately benefits from the new arrangements. “Sometimes It’s Hard to Breathe” establishes the album’s spacious, atmospheric character, while “Shorty’s Ark” turns its catalog of creatures into something almost cinematic, with the woodwinds creating movement and color around Oldham’s understated vocal. “London May,” originally released on The Purple Bird, is transformed most dramatically: what was relatively restrained in the studio becomes more expansive and emotionally charged, with the horns helping propel the song from ominous tension toward something approaching triumph. “Downstream,” the third Purple Bird selection, adds Dave Ferguson’s voice to Oldham’s meditation on environmental deterioration, further broadening the album’s palette.
The older songs fare just as well. “Strange Form of Life,” originally from 2006’s The Letting Go, develops into a richly layered performance as piano and saxophones surround Oldham’s distinctive voice. “This Is Far From Over” remains intimate but gains additional texture from the woodwinds, while “Trees of Hell” becomes one of the album’s most striking transformations. The song’s dark imagery is matched by increasingly dissonant saxophones, turning the performance into something ominous and almost apocalyptic. That intensity takes on additional resonance given that these Los Angeles performances occurred shortly after the devastating wildfires, and the filmed performance of “Trees of Hell” was released alongside the album.
Closing with “I See a Darkness,” Oldham returns to perhaps his best-known song and somehow finds another dimension in it. The familiar melody is surrounded by spare guitar, piano and woodwinds, while his weathered vocal delivery gives the song a different kind of gravity than its 1999 studio recording. At just eight songs and roughly 32 minutes, Ghosts of American Psychonauts is considerably shorter than a typical full-length album, but its brevity works in its favor: there is little excess, and every performance contributes to the album’s atmosphere of restraint, unease and quiet wonder. More than simply another live document, it demonstrates how radically Oldham can reshape his own material without losing what made the songs resonate in the first place. – Jason Felton