Joseph Will Oldham (born January 15, 1970) is an American singer-songwriter and actor. From 1993 to 1997, he performed and recorded in collaboration with dozens of other musicians under variations of Palace (Palace, Palace Brothers, Palace Songs, and Palace Music).^[3] After briefly publishing music under his own name, in 1998 he adopted Bonnie "Prince" Billy as the name for most of his work.

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Will Oldham
Oldham in 2009
Background information
Also known as	Palace Brothers Palace Music Palace Songs Bonnie "Prince" Billy
Born	(1970-01-15) January 15, 1970 (age 54) Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.
Genres	Country rock[1] freak folk[2] gothic country[1] lo-fi[1] indie folk alternative country
Years active	1993–present
Labels	Drag City Domino Spunk
Website	bonnieprincebilly.com

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Oldham was born on January 15, 1970, in Louisville, Kentucky.^[4] His mother, Joanne Lei Will Tafel Oldham, was a teacher and artist.^[5] His father, Joseph Collins Oldham, was an attorney and photographer.^[6] Oldham graduated from the J. Graham Brown School in 1988. He attended Brown University sporadically while pursuing a career as an actor, and living between Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Bloomington, Indiana.^[7] He began making music during this time, initially as a project for his professor Jeff Todd Titon, an ethnomusicologist at Brown University.^[8]

Oldham is known for his "do-it-yourself punk aesthetic and blunt honesty",^[9] and his music has been likened to Americana, folk, roots, country, punk, and indie rock. He has been called an "Appalachian post-punk solipsist",^[9] with a voice that has been described as "a fragile sort-of warble frittering around haunted melodies in the American folk or country tradition."^[9]

Oldham first performed and recorded under various permutations of the Palace name, including Palace Brothers, Palace Songs, Palace Music, and simply Palace. Regarding the name changes during this period (1993–1997), Oldham said:

I guess the idea is that when you have a name of a group or an artist, then you expect that the next record, if it has the same name, should be the same group of people playing on it. And I just thought we were making a different kind of record each time, with different people, and different themes, and different sounds. So I thought it was important to call it something different so that people would be aware of the differences.^[10]

Will stated in a 1995 interview with KCRW that the name Palace Flophouse was inspired by reading John Steinbeck's Cannery Row. Beginning in 1998, Oldham has primarily used the moniker Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, which draws inspiration from several sources:

[T]he name has so many different references that it could almost have a life of its own. Bonnie Prince Charlie has such a beautiful ring to it, and I was very conscious of appropriating that mellifluous sound. And I was also thinking about the name Nat King Cole. But it wasn't until later, and this may have been subconscious, that I remembered that Billy the Kid was William Bonney or Billy Bonney.^[10]

He has explained that "the primary purpose of the pseudonym is to allow both the audience and the performer to have a relationship with the performer that is valid and unbreakable."^[11]

Oldham married the textile artist Elsa Hansen in 2016.^[27][28] They had a child together in 2018.^[29]