Bonnie Prince Billy & Jonathan Richman touring together (BV presale for NYC show)
Bonnie Prince Billy's new album I Made a Place is out this Friday and he's just announced a tour in support happening in spring 2020 where he'll be joined along the way by the great Jonathan Richman. Will Oldham will have Emmett Kelly (Ty Segall's Freedom Band) backing him, while Jonathan will have longtime drummer Tommy Larkins along for the ride.
The NYC date of the tour happens at Town Hall on March 9. Tickets for Town Hall go on sale Friday, November 15 at 10 AM but you can get them early with the BrooklynVegan presale that starts today at noon. Use password GIRLFREN.
The tour is an cool pairing; Will and Jonathan have known each other for a while and Jonathan has stayed at Will's house while on tour:
When musician friends pass through town on tour, [Oldham] offers up the back bedroom, or the attic, or the floor. Last year he put up Jonathan Richman, a living legend of the pre-punk era. They met at an Oldham show in Grass Valley, California, a few years earlier, then struck up a correspondence by mail. “He's not an e-mailer. He's not a cell-phone person,” Oldham says. They exchanged letters, and when Richman announced a tour with a Louisville date, Oldham invited him to crash here. The next morning Richman sat on this couch with a notebook, studying Sanskrit, because that is apparently a thing Jonathan Richman does now; when Oldham had to step out to buy laundry detergent, Richman came along with his guitar and serenaded Oldham all the way to the drugstore and back, as if reprising his role as the one-man Greek chorus from There's Something About Mary...“I think I share more things with [Richman] than most people in music you could think of,” he says. [GQ]
All tour dates are listed, along with videos from Bonnie "Prince" Billy's new album and a few Jonathan songs, below.
Bonnie Prince Billy / Jonathan Richman - 2020 Tour Dates
3/5/20 Buskirk-Chumley Theatre Bloomington IN
3/6/20 Stuart's Opera House Nelsonville OH
3/7/20 Lincoln Theatre Washington DC
3/8/20 Union Transfer Philadelphia PA
3/9/20 Town Hall New York NY
3/11/20 College Street Music Hall New Haven CT
3/12/20 Columbus Theatre Providence RI
3/13/20 State Theatre Portland ME
3/14/20 Academy of Music Theatre Northampton MA