Superwolf Turns 20

"I have often said that I would like to be dead in shark's mouth." That's the opening line. It comes from "My Home Is The Sea," a hazy classic-rock fantasia full of interlocked circular riffage, an arrangement that manages to be quiet and heavy at the same time. Those guitars evoke sun-bleached sand, longhorn skulls, a mythic landscape that we only know from cowboy movies. Will Oldham sings that opening line in a dazed croak, with long pauses. When he sings that he would like to be dead, he comes off like some ancient bygone blues legend, a character from straight out of American myths. But then he adds "in shark's mouth," and the whole thing quickly turns absurd. If there were any ancient blues guys who moaned about wanting to be consumed by marine predators, I never heard them.

That was my first exposure -- not just to Will Oldham and Matt Sweeney's Superwolf album but to Oldham's entire extended Bonnie 'Prince' Billy project and to all the decades that he spent fucking up expectations. Before Superwolf, I was nebulously aware of Oldham and his whole deal. I understood him as a ragged country-folk singer with some trickster tendencies, a guy who you might like if you were into Pavement. For a while, he kept changing his name from album to album -- Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. At some point, I had a co-worker who was really into him. At some other point, I heard Johnny Cash's cover of "I See A Darkness," with a sensibly awestruck Oldham on backing vocals. I was like: Oh, cool, I get it. Maybe I'll do a deeper dive sometime. But I did not get it, and that much became obvious within a few seconds of Superwolf.

Superwolf, which will celebrate its 20th anniversary on Saturday, is some other shit. The music is dusty out-of-time ragged minimalism, and it's beautiful. Much of the time, the only instrument we hear is Matt Sweeney's fuzzed-out electric guitar, but that guitar conjures entire worlds, and you can forget that you aren't hearing a full band. Sweeney can evoke moods, tingling softly in the background behind Oldham's voice, and then he can suddenly flare up into a cinematic crunch-roar that makes the world around you feel more vivid and present. At different points, the music on Superwolf reminds me of Neil Young's Dead Man score, of Earth, of Lungfish. Sweeney was basically playing country-folk songs, but he brought a tension-and-release fury that make even the softest moments feel tense and coiled. I loved it. I still love it.

Will Oldham's voice is just as beautiful -- a high-lonesome howl that can be elliptical and purposeful at the same time. He sang with a strained, passionate intensity, and I'd learned to understand that kind of delivery as a vehicle for sincere, confessional lyrics. But Will Oldham wasn't singing sincere, confessional lyrics, or if he was, he was phrasing them in ways so absolutely fucking weird that I couldn't even process what was happening. That "in shark's mouth" bit was just the beginning. I could understand that, at least partially -- the lure of the unknown, the preference to die in a spectacular way. But by the time he reached the end of "My Home Is The Sea," Oldham was talking about "goodnight, love, my tummy is round and firm and funny," and I had no idea what to make of that. Was he just fucking around? Was he using the musical language of sincerity to make his fuck-arounds land that much harder?

This was all part of the Will Oldham proposition, but I didn't know that at the time. As a writer, Oldham is poetic and cryptic and sometimes intentionally ridiculous. He'll be singing the most beautiful song you ever heard, and you'll slowly understand that it's all about how he loves getting blowjobs in public. Or maybe it's about how his character loves getting blowjobs in public; you can never tell with this guy. At this point, Oldham's catalog is deep and full of gems, and lots of people have probably found lots of entry points. But I'm glad that mine was Superwolf -- an album that obscures and foregrounds its absurdity at the same time. I had no idea what I was hearing, and I was hypnotized.

Will Oldham and Matt Sweeney didn't go into Superwolf with any big, pretentious aims. When they made the record, Oldham and Sweeney were in their mid-thirties, and they'd been kicking around various indie scenes for a long while. Oldham started out as a young character actor in John Sayles' Matewan, and he began releasing his own quasi-country meditations in the early '90s -- essentially doing weirdo folk shit for underground rock heads. Sweeney led Chavez, a band who released a few albums of splintery indie rock on Matador in the '90s, and he became a roving guitar ace who would come in and play for contemporaries who needed a guitar ace, whether that meant Guided By Voices or Cat Power.

In the mid-'00s, Oldham and Sweeney were both busy. In 2004, Oldham released Bonnie 'Prince' Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music, an album where he re-recorded his older lo-fi songs with Nashville country session musicians. As younger musicians were taking off running with his tape-hiss aesthetic and turning that into freak-folk, Oldham was figuring out how he might sound as a polished old-school pop-country type -- a willfully perverse move in a career full of them. At the same time, he was still doing occasional indie-film character-actor stuff. In the same year that Superwolf came out, Oldham had a decent-sized role in Junebug, the quirky dramedy that made Amy Adams a star. A year later, he was one of the leads in Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy.

Matt Sweeney, meanwhile, was coming off his run in Zwan, Billy Corgan's vaguely disastrous post-Smashing Pumpkins band. Zwan lasted for about a year and released exactly one album, and then everyone involved talked about it like they'd been in the trenches in World War I. It must've been a weird experience. Sweeney was just starting to transition into proper session-musician work through Rick Rubin. A year after Superwolf, Sweeney's playing appeared on Johnny Cash and Dixie Chicks records. Sweeney was in a transitional state, and he knew Will Oldham well. He'd played on the 2001 Bonnie 'Prince' Billy album Ease Down The Road, and he'd toured in Oldham's backing band a few times. So when Oldham hit Sweeney with a challenge, Sweeney was interested. Oldham had some lyrics, and he thought maybe Sweeney could come up with some music for them. That's it. That was the whole concept -- words by Oldham, music by Sweeney.

The concept might've been simple, but the end result wasn't. Big things happen on Superwolf. Sometimes, Oldham and Sweeney both play guitar, and their riffs wrap themselves around each other lazily but intricately. Sweeney sings backup, and he sounds just like Oldham -- not like Oldham has been multi-tracked but like there are somehow two Will Oldhams in the same room, harmonizing with each other. Most of the time, Oldham and Sweeney are the only musicians in the picture, but a couple of others show up from time to time. There's a drummer named Peter Townsend, but it's not that one. On the eight-minute zone-out "Blood Embrace," two other voices appear, those of William Devane and Lisa Blake Richards. It's a bit of dialog about numbness and connection and adultery, and it comes from the great 1977 exploitation flick Rolling Thunder, but I didn't know that until later. In the moment, that part was just as enigmatic as everything else.

Oldham's lyrics, the things that necessitated the album's creation in the first place, are simple but oblique, and they're mostly about devotion or transcendence or the place where those things overlap. Sometimes, though, they're about something else: "On a bench with your twisted fingers in me/ In the rain with my sundress torn off of me." Or maybe that's about devotion and transcendence, too. When Superwolf was new, I definitely took those lines as pure pranky provocation, but maybe that's my own limited imagination. Maybe that's the point of the pranky provocation in the first place -- to force you to confront the idea that devotion and transcendence can take different forms.

All through Superwolf, Will Oldham's voice is unadorned, with no tape-hiss or musical clutter to drown him out. Every lyric is right up front, and you have to deal with it if you're going to hear this album. I didn't really understand why I was so drawn to Superwolf, but I just kept playing it again and again. For years, Superwolf was often the record that I'd put on when I wasn't sure what else to play. It's still my favorite thing that either Oldham or Sweeney has done, even though I've never quite understood its gravitational force. Maybe that's why it's my favorite thing from either of them. Superwolf resists interpretation.

Will Oldham and Matt Sweeney did not treat Superwolf as if it was a masterpiece, even though that's what I think it is. They released the album on Drag City with scarcely any promotion, and I can't even remember why I bought it. Maybe this was when I was buying everything that got Best New Music in Pitchfork, or maybe the reviews made it look like the place to jump into the whole Will Oldham thing. Superwolf came in a too-big CD envelope, so it didn't fit in right with all my other CDs. That was fine. I put it on too often for it to be filed away anyway. There was a grainy, low-budget video for album closer "I Gave You," but I don't think I knew that until this very moment. YouTube didn't exist yet, so a video like that had no real reason to exist.

Oldham and Sweeney did a tiny bit of touring behind Superwolf, but it was scattershot and mysterious. I saw the two of them play a free, unannounced show at the Ottobar in Baltimore -- not in the main room but in the upstairs bar/hangout space that wasn't even hosting DJ nights at that point. Someone had to tell you that the show was happening, or else you weren't there. I remember them being good, but my takeaway was more like: "Whoa, there they are, Oldham and Sweeney. Wild."

Soon after Superwolf, Oldham and Sweeney were off doing different things. I remember a vague intimation that Superwolf was supposed to be a band, not just an album, but it didn't really work out that way. In the stretch that followed, Oldham and Sweeney would temporarily join forces and drop another track here or there. Sixteen years later, they finally got back together and made Superwolves, their second album as a duo. So maybe Superwolf is a band, and they're putting out infrequent albums and going with the Alien-franchise naming convention. I look forward to Superwolf 3 but the 3 looks like an exponent, Superwolf Resurrection, Superwolf Vs. Predator.

Superwolves is great, too. That album came out when my father was dying and I was wrapping my brain around what was happening, and there's a song on there called "Resist The Urge" in which a father prepares his kids for the inevitability of his death. That song fucked me up. I played it over and over, and I never play it now. My reaction had a lot to do with my life circumstances, but maybe someone else would be hit just as hard by some other moment on that record. Anyway, my reaction to the first Superwolf had a lot to do with my life circumstances then, too. With Superwolves, Olham and Sweeney were able to recapture that mysterious old power, seemingly at will. What a gift -- to have this incredible artistic brain-meld ability and then to use it so infrequently.

But even with all that chemistry and grace, Superwolves can't quite match the impression that the original Superwolf made on me. Nothing can. With these Anniversary pieces, we usually get deep into the contexts behind these albums, the cultural roles that they played when they were new. You can't really do that with Superwolf, since the context and cultural impact were both minimal. But if you were in the right place in life to really hear that album, it did something to you.

Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham remain plenty busy these days. Next week, Oldham will release another Bonnie 'Price' Billy album, one of his occasional forays into Nashville studio-country. It's good. I like it. Maybe he and Sweeney will eventually do another Superwolf record, too. But both of those guys could go silent for the rest of eternity -- they could die in sharks' mouths -- and they would not change in my estimation. I would still know them as the people who made Superwolf, and I would be grateful.