Day 0895 - I See a Darkness" (1999)

Bonnie Prince Billy "I See a Darkness" (1999)

Will Oldham had been making music for a while under different aliases.  As well as his own name, he’d recorded with groups named Palace Brothers and Palace Music.  Oldham explained the reason for these changing names was that he was making different music with each ensemble/project so wanted to signpost this with the name changes.

This is the first album released under the Bonnie “Prince” Billy nom de plume, and he seems to have stuck with it since then.

The sound here is a kind of delicate, gloomy folk.   It's really subdued, stripped down, acoustic and brilliant with occasional rocking outbursts.  "Nomadic Revery" kind of reminds me of Nirvana unplugged covering the Meat Puppets.  Tracks elsewhere could be favourably compared to Nick Cave's "The Boatman's Call" album.

The album was well received critically and other artists looked to cover the songs, most notably Johnny Cash covering the title track on one of his "American Recordings" albums.

Day 0893 - The Slim Shady LP

Eminem "The Slim Shady LP" (1999)

Eminem/Slim Shady/Marshall Mathers' story has already been told (in broad strokes) via the film "8 Mile":  Poor, working class white kid in a predominantly black neighbourhood, falls in love with hip-hop and builds up his skill in  underground rap battles.

Mathers released the relatively straight-ahead  hip-hop album "Infinite" which was a commercial failure and led to some DJs suggesting that as a white guy he should stick to 'rock'.   Mathers channelled his anger and frustration into a new persona Slim Shady, an angry-yet-mischievous alter ego who could and would say anything Mathers wanted him to say.

The character was a success, after an EP release, Mathers got to work with N.W.A.'s Dr Dre of whom he was a fan.   The pair worked well together, with beats by Dre inspiring Em.   The arrangements are mostly just stripped back to bass and beats while Mathers is rapping, but with lots of interesting bits and pieces going on in between.    

The album opens with a pretty hefty 1-2 punch of "My Name is" and "Guilty Conscience", both solid tracks that introduce the new anarchic, angry Slim Shady (his voice even sounds different than from on "Infinite") who was also an engaging storyteller.  

Where Will Smith released "Just the two of us" as a loving ode to fatherhood, Eminem's track "97' Bonnie and Clyde" previously also titled "Just the two of us" is a horror story of making his daughter unwitting accessory to murder.   The horror theme feels like it's continued on "Rock Bottom" the backing track of which sounds akin to old giallo soundtracks, maybe something from Morricone.

Mathers' first album sold around 1,000 copies.  Though he would come to largely retire the Slim Shady character as he matured, Slim helped him sell millions of copies of this second album and essentially put him on the musical map.

Day 0657 - Nick of Time

Bonnie Raitt "Nick of Time" (1989)

To say that Bonnie had had a hard time of it, would be understating things slightly.  Her record company dropped her due to low sales, and (after a two year gap) released the album she'd been working on prior to being dropped, but under a completely different title.  This left Bonnie to promote an album of 2 year old material that she was no longer particularly connected to.
Her romantic relationship ended, she had to disband her backing band as she couldn't afford to pay them, and she fell into a slump of addiction and depression.

After a brief attempt to work with Prince (seems that everyone was doing that in the late 80s/early 90s) Bonnie was put together with Don Was from the group Was (Not Was) of "Walk the Dinosaur" fame.  It ended up being one of those fruitful artist/producer match-ups.  Was matched Raitt's bluesy rock and country-tinged balladry with a little pop sensibility and studio sparkle to create "Nick of Time" and its follow-up "Luck of the Draw", both of which successfully revived Bonnie's career.

Bonnie Raitt is another of those artists where I'd heard her name but had never heard any of her songs... unlike other artists on the list though, her music sounded pretty much exactly as I'd expected it would.