Dawn McCarthy & Bonny Billy - Wai Notes (2021)

Wai Notes is a 2007 album by Dawn McCarthy and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, credited here as Bonny Billy. It is a collection of demo songs for The Letting Go. The album comprises recordings on tapes exchanged between Will Oldham and Dawn McCarthy through the mail prior to recording The Letting Go. Only 10,000 copies were duplicated.

Will Oldham's (thankfully) crowded discography gained a pair of low-key releases in the past few months: Wai Notes, a set of The Letting Go demos and Wilding in the West, a Japanese/Australian-only live album from Oldham's 2007 tour that includes at least one "remix" by Royal Trux's Neil Michael Hagerty. On the heels of November's Ask Forgiveness EP, these releases risked giving off a "Dear Fans: Thanks, also fuck off"-vibe, but since precisely no one's child is going Ivy League off of 10,000 copies of Wai Notes it's probably safe to assume we're being asked to pony up again in the name of Art.

Wai Notes comes impeccably wrapped in stamped cardstock, its cover featuring a woman…in a woman suit, the backside boasting a glossy of a hambone Oldham sitting with The Letting Go collaborator Dawn McCarthy. What's not clear is why these 10 demos weren't packaged with their parent album instead of the more useful rarities disc Little Lost Blues, now difficult to obtain itself. The fickle nature of the Oldham cult all but assures that had Wai Notes preceded The Letting Go it would've been hailed as a return to sonically quaint beginnings; on at least two occasions Oldham sings the wrong lyric and immediately mutters a correction into the margin. And it is worth wondering why Oldham no longer makes records like "The Signifying Wolf", on which a tiny guitar unravels and exposes horny animal chants.

But hell: The Letting Go, driven by Nico Muhly's tempest string arrangements, was the most clearly conceived record of Oldham's career. Airing the dirty laundry of sleepy-dog ballads like "Then the Letting Go" or "I Called You Back" does them no favors. Hearing Oldham tiptoe his way through "Wai"-- his fingers hang over chords, as if he's trying to remember the changes-- is thrilling in a voyeuristic sort of way, but Oldham's is a catalog that already contains its share of flubbed notes.