Bonnie “Prince” Billy & The Cairo Gang

Saturday, December 4, 2010 | 8:00 pm

Reynolds Industries Theater

In a high-mountain warble “that can be described only as miraculous” (NY Times), Bonnie “Prince” Billy—Will Oldham—sings austerely beautiful songs about abandoned meadows and carnal love, charging loss with fragile transcendence. Stalked by ghosts, Oldham’s upended Americana is as powerful as his capacity for self-invention. In his newest guise as the Bonnie Prince, the shape-shifting Kentucky native continues, paradoxically, to expose genuine aspects of himself. Backed by longtime collaborator Emmett Kelly—”the Cairo Gang”—his poetic confessionals will heat Reynolds with “quiet fire” (Pitchfork).

“Oldham eschews traditional genre labels, but his deeply emotional, sometimes primitive acoustic songs, resonate with a rare beauty and literary vision”
—NPR