One afternoon in Los Angeles in 2000, only seven years after he began releasing records, Will Oldham met two people who would “stay in my mind for the rest of my life”. The first was a gruff sound engineer, David “Ferg” Ferguson, who had been mentored by “Cowboy” Jack Clement, the renowned Sun Records producer who worked with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. The second, whom Oldham first saw in Rick Rubin’s studio hallway – “I’ll be unpacking this for the rest of my life” – was Johnny Cash.
“His physical size and his legacy towered over me at first and then steadily, warmly diminished,” Oldham remembers. Oldham had just turned 30; Cash was 68, ailing, but working hard on his third album of later-life covers, American Recordings III: Solitary Man. It included the title track from Oldham’s 1999 breakthrough album, I See a Darkness, his first under the moniker of Bonnie “Prince” Billy (one he’s been embarrassed about in the past, but loves now, “because the spirit of creation of that entity was that it had to be all about fun”).
