In April, old friends and collaborators Matt Sweeney and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy finally released their truly stunning collaborative album Superwolves, the 16-years-later sequel to their first LP Superwolf. Today, Sweeney and Bonnie Billy have covered a song from another pair of musicians who come from the same community, the great Louisville Kentucky folk musicians Joan Shelley and Nathan Salsburg. In turn, Shelley and Salsburg have covered the Superwolves duo.

Will Oldham has known Joan Shelley and Nathan Salsburg for a long time, and they’ve worked together plenty. Oldham sang on some of the songs from Shelley’s gorgeous 2019 album Like The River Loves The Sea, while Shelley and Salsburg were both part of Oldham’s backing band on the 2019 Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album I Made A Place. Later this year, Salsburg will release his own album Psalms, and Oldham is part of the backing band on that one. So this new digital single is really an extension of a bunch of long-running collaborations.

For the single, Shelley and Salsburg have recorded a lovely version of “Watch What Happens,” one of the songs from Superwolves. In turn, Sweeney and Oldham have come out an extremely cool take on “Stay On My Shore,” a song from Shelley’s 2015 album Over And Even. Listen to both of them below.

In a press release, Will Oldham says:

There was a time when new songs got shared around, and when a new song was coming out it wasn’t strange for multiple recording artists to have a go at the song, and oftentimes a new composition would be recorded and released by multiple artists on multiple labels within its first year of public existence. All you have to do is listen to the first two episodes of the new season of Tyler Mahan Coe’s Cocaine And Rhinestones podcast to get a feel for this phenomenon. So we’re harkening back to more collaborative and competitive times, when songwriters and singers and publishers and producers knew what each other was up to, when we here release Joan Shelley and Nathan Salsburg’s take on our new “Watch What Happens.” To be fair and fun, Sweeney and I got our hands really really dirty by thrusting them into the loam of Joanie’s ‘Stay On My Shore,” which Matt turned from a frank admission of vulnerable love into something somewhat… creepier. I’ve sung “Stay on My Shore” with Nathan and Joan many many times in the years since its recording six years ago, and I’m thrilled to sing on it every single time. Each time I sing on it, I try to wring out of it some of the weird hard complexities of my own understanding and appreciation of romantic need; it’s chock full of power and potential to be so dissected and revisited. Matt made it modal and dirgy, as scary as anything Siouxie Sioux or Baby Dee have ever intoned… maybe. The past year-and-a-half has made many of us workers-in-song reach out over distance to reassure and inspire each other, and here we have joyfully volleyed our musical ideas forth and back, as friends and siblings in the cause.

Meanwhile, Joan Shelley says:

Being asked to cover someone’s song is like being invited to rearrange someone’s room. Already admiring the Superwolves’ furnishings and spatial sense, we found plenty of fun and satisfaction just messing with their stuff, rifling through their drawers, sitting in their chairs, jumping on their bed, and watching what happens.

The Watch What Happens digital split is out now on Drag City. Also, Matt Sweeney and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy are heading out on a short California tour, starting tonight in Big Sur. Here are those dates.

TOUR DATES:
6/07-08 – Big Sur, CA @ Henry Miller Memorial Library
6/10-11 – Sonoma, CA @ Gundlach Bundschu Winery
6/12 – Ojai, CA @ Ojai Retreat & Inn
6/13 – Malibu, CA @ Dry Gulch Ranch
6/16 – Pioneertown, CA @ Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown