Under an increasingly unfamiliar horizon, head for the country and build a home for yourself there. This is a safe place, where you can close the blinds and wait out the accident that you already half-knew was coming. Civilization’s fatalistic collapse is a lion outside the front door, while you are inside creating your own kingdom of self-protection. This is your Hydra, your Coney Island, your Abbey Road. You have assessed the danger the future holds and have determined the only possible method of survival: to find yourself a moment with something beautiful in order to smooth over the edges of what tomorrow might bring. Peaceful surrender.

In We Are Together Again, Bonnie “Prince” Billy (Will Oldham) confronts the fear of the unknown by holding his loved ones close. There is a jewelbox quality to how he shares his world-weary grief while allowing light to dapple in through the dusky edges, reshaping his more misanthropic doubts on lead tracks like Life Is Scary Horses, “the human times have come and gone/we must accept our time is done,” into the delicate hopefulness of songs like “Hey Little,” written for his daughter. The album, almost in its entirety, feels as though it was written to speak in some ways directly to her. Oldham is a father trying to make sense of the senseless for the sake of his child, leaving joy to flicker like a lantern throughout the record as a guide, giving off the same atmosphere as children’s bedtime stories being told during wartime.

In the later half of the album, Davey Dead reckons with the total absence of that joy. The song acts as an inverted image to the earlier track (Everybody’s Got A) Friend Named Joe, where Oldham evaluates the museum of characters that have entered and exited his life with thankful affection. Joe is a gentle hand that sees Oldham through the worst of his own depression and fear and out the other side, while Davey acts as a warning to those who have fallen into the pit of themselves, and allowed the world to make them cruel, “If you destroy a child’s perspective/here is what that child will do.” We Are Together Again constantly affirms tenderness as the only tool we have to reconcile with the world as it stands. The kids are alright, but only if we protect them. We will survive the night, but only by finding someone to care for. For an album that grapples with the ultimate question of how does one cope with an unknown future? The conclusion Oldham seems to have drawn is to protect innocence, to find someone to love, and to create a new history between you where there is the possibility of something kinder. It might be a bandaid on a bullet wound, but what else is there?

In a relatively compact album (ten songs, just hitting a forty-five-minute runtime), the subject matter at hand feels, at times, somewhat claustrophobic. Even as the songwriting shifts perspectives of who Oldham is speaking to (his daughter, his wife, his friends, one memorable enemy), Oldham’s anxiety is an unrelenting note under every chorus. Track six, Vietnam Sunshine, the record’s highlight, is the only moment outside of Hey Little where Oldham seems to find any true sense of relief, allowing a bright horn backing and an accompaniment by Louisville violinist Sara Louise Callaway to carry some of the weight of the preceding tracks while he delivers the record’s thesis statement in the song’s final verse, “Now we restructure the whole of society/Place bliss and equality right at its core/Make worship of love the true sign of piety/Strive for God-like perspective, and love nothing more,”

By the album’s conclusion, Oldham hasn’t so much conquered his own fear as he has accepted it and defined his terms on how he will find a way to move forward. By examining his own history through the context of the lives that have been intertwined alongside his, We Are Together Again is an intimate farewell to the foundations of the world you thought you understood, and the handoff of a cautiously hopeful manifesto to the next generation. The lion is still waiting at the door; the light outside might be end-of-times-sunshine, or maybe it’s just another morning. In the final verse of the album, Oldham repeats I love you three times: once as a prayer, twice as a touchstone, and the final time as the only truth he can be completely sure of.

Order We Are Together Again by Bonnie Prince Billy HERE