Since releasing the single “Ohio River Boat Song” in 1992, Will Oldham has been one of the most interesting and enigmatic artists in contemporary music. For the past 13 years, Oldham has been releasing beautiful folk, rock and country music paired with unexpected lyrical turns under various names, including Palace, Palace Music, Palace Songs and, most recently, Bonnie “Prince” Billy. In a rare interview last week, Oldham spoke with the Weekly about 2004’s Bonnie “Prince” Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music, and his newest work, a brilliant collaboration with Matt Sweeney titled Superwolf, with the same sort of rambling ruminations that mark his music.

Talking by phone from Los Angeles, Oldham explained that he had a simple reason for recording each project under a different name.

“Most of the names were decisions made while you were putting the artwork together,” he says. “It didn’t really have to do with anything except for basically wanting to extend the differences and say: ‘yeah, this is a different record. This is not part two of the last record. This is a new record.’”

Oldham said he believes there is a deviation between his earlier Palace work and his recent recordings under the Bonnie “Prince” Billy monniker. “All the records that are Palace, Palace Music records, they came from a different place that is more naïve,” he says.

On last year’s Bonnie “Prince” Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music, which received a five-star review from London’s The Guardian, the singer/songwriter revisits his own past classics, like “Agnes, Queen of Sorrow” and “I Am a Cinematographer,” with a group of Nashville session musicians. Oldham says he did not intend to cover his past work —that in fact, he was looking to cover songs by artists like Meatloaf, Journey and Styx with the Nashville players. But in the end he decided to revisit his Palace songs.

“In order to feel justified in playing them to a Bonnie “Prince” Billy audience, it was necessary to create a new relationship with the songs,” he says.

While working on the album, Oldham wrote a lot of new lyrics. After being invited to perform at the Domino Records 10th Anniversary Party in London, Oldham contacted Matt Sweeney—a friend who was former frontman for the indie-rock group Chavez and the guitarist for Zwan, Billy Corgan’s first post-Smashing Pumpkins group.

Within weeks, Sweeney had composed the music for three of Oldham’s Superwolf numbers. When Oldham first heard Sweeney’s compositions, he was floored.

“I just felt so completely lucky and charged,” he says.

After playing the songs in London, Oldham and Sweeney decided to collaborate more. The fruit of their collaboration is the 11-song Superwolf, which was recorded at Oldham’s bother’s studio in Kentucky.

The album begins with the beautiful “My Home Is the Sea”—a twangy rocker with harmony vocals where Sweeney’s fluid guitar work slowly builds and ebbs like the song’s subject—and runs through meditative numbers with unexpected lyrical turns (“Beast For Thee”) before ending with the truly devastating “I Gave You,” a song that is so simple and powerful that it feels traditional.

Throughout the album’s 44 minutes, several themes emerge, including a search for love and a final resting place, and an assessment of man’s relationship to God. Oldham says he believes that he is still influenced by the religious music he heard in Kentucky as a boy.

“I know that there’s something in those records that stays with me, that I haven’t figured out yet,” he says. “There’s something in them that really makes sense.”

On “Death In the Sea,” Oldham sings about wanting the sea to be his final resting place. He explains that this is the results of some of his fears, “being scared of closed-in places, closed doors and basically just limits and thinking that that’s a big, huge thing that I would trust the decomposition of everything I am to.”

Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney play Fernwood, 24 miles south of Carmel on Highway 1 in Big Sur, Friday and Saturday at 8:30pm. $8/advance tickets e-mail abagproduction@yahoo.com, $10/at the door. 667-2422.