Dear Drag City promo department,
My name is Peter Murphy. This week the new record from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy arrived in the post. I was looking forward to reviewing it – I very much dig what BPB does. I have reviewed maybe half a dozen of his albums for this periodical over the past decade and always gave them an honest – and usually positive – write up.
The latest album Beware sounds like a beauty. The melodies are joyful, the man’s never sung better, and the music is sublime – swaying guitars and pedal steel, female backing vocals framing the mainman. ‘You Are Lost’ in particular is drop dead gorgeous. In short, Beware sounds like one of the best things Billy’s ever done.
Unfortunately I can’t give it a fair hearing. Why? You know damn well why. It’s because the promo version of the album is encoded with a spoken message that interrupts the music twice (or maybe three times, I lost count) per track. The first time it was kind of funny: “This is a promotional copy of Beware by Bonnie Prince Billy.” Ha-ha. You got me. The second time – “You are still listening to a promotional copy of Beware by Bonnie Prince Billy,” was far less so. By the end of track two, a prairie lullaby entitled ‘You Can’t Hurt Me Now’, it was about as funny as a kick in the balls. By the end of the album I was fit to be tied.
I don’t know whose bright idea this was. Maybe the directive was issued by BPB himself. Perhaps it was intended to preclude album piracy (if so, you might have warned me: I’d have burned an online copy and listened to it in peace – next time I suggest you watermark it the way everyone else does). Maybe it’s somebody’s idea of a postmodern comment on sycophantic artist/label/media symbiosis. Whatever, it completely spoiled my enjoyment of – and ability to review – the album in question. It also left me with the nasty feeling of being the butt of some condescending joke.
You see friends, I am not the devil, or some corporate lackey sucking the artist’s lifeblood dry. I’m just a fellow who writes about music. And if you don’t want the work reviewed, don’t waste my time and your money pressing up promo copies defaced with public service announcements. And so, as a longtime Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy devotee and connoisseur of recordings put out by Drag City, it is with some regret that I request you go yank somebody else’s chain.
Sincerely yours,

Key Track: 'You are lost'