Sally Timms joins Bonnie “Prince” Billy on new single, “Life is Scary Horses"

William Oldham — the musician behind the Bonnie “Prince” Billy moniker — describes "Life is Scary Horses" as a "spiritual cover" of Timms' and Jon Langford's composition "Horses". The track was released in 1988 by Sally Timms and The Drifting Cowgirls on their album Somebody's Rockin' My Dreamboat, which Oldham went on to cover in 2004.

Just over twenty years later, "Life is Scary Horses" sees Oldham invite Timms to sing on the track and appear in the accompanying video, directed by filmmaker Braden King. Discussing the song, Oldham explains: "A primary reason to cover a song comes from the unanswered questions the song poses in our individual or collective psyches, and I have mulled 'Horses' -generated questions over and over and over again in all sorts of circumstances until finally I thought I could bring those questions to life in a new composition, a new recording, of what can technically and essentially be called a new song."

Speaking on the video, King — who also directed the video for Oldham's 2004 cover of "Horses" — adds: "This piece carries long memory. Will and I have been moving in and out of each other’s orbits for over half my life - his friendship, collaboration and music - along with Sally Timms’ own – are woven into me. Somehow, making this felt less like creating something new than uncovering something that had been waiting a long time to surface. It’s a message assembled from fragments; landscapes and symbols gathered from a world that’s slipping away and what remains when certainty is gone. As it evolved, the piece itself began to feel like a relic: an elegy left behind for a future that might not remember us – or maybe one that might be trying to learn who we were.”