I am goodbye

I’ve been listening to Bonnie Prince Billy’s Beware! pretty much nonstop for about a week. I probably ain’t getting most of it, but it reads to me like a playful meditation on one of the most hoary of country music tropes, the “beware of me, little lady, for I’ll only break your heart” song. Billy Joe Shaver and Waylon Jennings pretty much perfected the form, making careers out of warning women of their untameable wildness, all the trouble they’d seen, their restless hearts, and their outlaw natures. Oldham expands on it and has a little fun at his own expense and, not entirely unkindly, at others’.