Will Oldham Quotes

I think that what trips up a lot of great musicians is that they become involved with too many things that aren't where their strengths lie.

The first music I bought when I was nine or 10 was pop music from the '50s and '60s, like The Everly Bros., Elvis, Del Shannon, The Flamingos, The Platters, whatever I could get my hands on. And then some musical things, like Camelot, Singing in the Rain and Hair.

As it turns out, as an adult I can have a very unpleasant, fierce and unforgiving temper at times. But I don't think I had that when I was a kid.

I need to go someplace faraway that doesn't have telephones and doesn't have a record player and doesn't have movie theaters and people walking down the street in order to not do anything.

I felt so liberated when I first saw Charles Mee’s 'The Glory of the World' at BAM play, because for me this is the gateway to contemplation, or this is the gateway to love, or this is the gateway to faith, not sitting and reading a book by an isolated monk, god bless him. This is.

I'd like my records to reach as many people as possible, but I'm also thinking in terms of how I can keep from getting jaded or unhappy with the process.

It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess.

I don't think that word - the word pirate - has any real meaning.

Or it's something that's had meaning imposed on it.

Frank Sinatra's never been handsome, but he's one of my favorite singers.

Who needs looks when you have a voice and power?

I don't usually read reviews. I usually read the interviews, just because I figure it's a good way to try to do them better if I ever have to do them again.

There's very little admirable about being a pirate.

There's very little functional about a pirate. There's very little real about a pirate.

On days where I feel the karma is in balance I'm not afraid of death.

And when I feel it's weighing heavily on the negative side, then I get very scared and just think about eternal damnation and how unpleasant that would be.

At the same time, you don't want to be blindsided at some point because you've taken too much comfort from knowing nothing. So you try to keep a little store of practical knowledge. At a certain point you have to pretend that something is true in order to have a relationship with the world.

There's nothing that compares to watching that final of Charles Mee’s 'The Glory of the World' play at BAM17 to 20 minute sequence in one sitting. It fills you with a giddy energy watching that. Then, being gifted with the silence that follows...I've never had a theatrical experience like that before, I'm sure.

A record is something that isn't real or true.

It's like cinema. It's a construction of something hyper-real and surreal and unreal all at the same time. You make a space that doesn't really exist. One of the big joys of being in this line of work is building the recorded versions of the songs.

The ideal is to put on shows where, if you go into the same space again, you don't remember ever having been there before, because where you were was a space that only existed that one time, created by the music.

I was worried before I saw the play 'The Seven Storey Mountain', thinking I don't really want to see a play about Thomas Merton. He probably wouldn't have either, ideally. Then it isn't. It's more about us and it's about our relationship to what he may or may not have thought about. It's its own thing completely.

You're hoping that it's going to be an extraordinary experience any time you create and/or listen to music with other people. I guess what I've been saying over the past few minutes is that it's hard to do that, to create that.

It's definitely important to be open enough to seize an opportunity when the opportunity is there.

To me, the best purpose of an interview would be to illuminate some things about how somebody works for the benefit of somebody else who wants to do those things. And that's not where most interviews go at all, so to me, they seem like strange exercises in small talk and wasted air.

There are a limited number of promoters out there who care about creating music.

You rarely meet a promoter who's like, "I want to be responsible for the best shows, I want to make sure that these are the best shows these audiences have ever seen."

Then little writings and recordings that thankfully continue to come up.

I'm in this kind of wonderful, kind of awkward, off-putting, and strange position where there's nothing I want to do more than continue to make music, but the ways that I do things are not in tune with how I can do them commercially.

The sense of waking up in the morning and knowing that there is music ahead of me in the day is such an incredible feeling. The more I engage with music the more days I wake up and know that that's what's going to be there, and the things that come with music.

I do not want a personal relationship with my fans.

Or to do anything that encourages them to think they have one with me. They can have a personal relationship with my songs. That's fine, but they don't know me.

It's nice to be able to backtrack and not be embarrassed by the music you used to listen to.

If we were making a record in Kentucky, there might be some more elements that recall a time, a place, or a relationship. Recording for the BBC you enter into this strange and wonderful, but kind of sterile, place with which you have no personal history, and that's the Maida Vale Studios at BBC in London.

I figure it's okay to make certain rules, whether or not people despise you for it at the time.

I really hate press.

My dream many years ago would've been to continue to write and record songs in record/album form for years to come, but now records aren't what they were then - and so it doesn't actually feel very good to make a record of songs.

The songs are not meant to be real life.

They're meant to have a psychic - rather than a factual - bearing on the listener. It's rare that a song grounded in reality moves me because I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. Songs are made to exist in and of themselves, like a great James Jones or Robert Louis Stevenson novel - they're not autobiographical, and yet there's a reality in every single page. It's real life of the imagination.

People are looking for fame or a focus, and I can't provide that.

When I was a kid, I always thought that acting was going to be the way to go.

Sometimes it will be for more money than I've ever been offered before.

I mean, am I an idiot again for not doing that?

My hope has always been that each record could have its own audience.

Of course, it's awesome to have a cumulative audience for more than one record, but I like the idea that there could be a record that an individual might like.

What is normally called religion is what I would tend to call music - participating in music, listening to music, making records and singing.

My booking agent, of course, here and overseas, their tendency is to want to build on a certain kind of measurable success, and I was thinking yesterday, what I'd like to do is maybe start to compile a list of the best 200 to 500 capacity rooms around the world and just start going to them again and again and again.

Too much emphasis is put on American roots music when people try and place me.

You know, I grew up listening to punk.

To sing with other people and for other people, that's when you can really learn something about your voice. You can only learn so much if you create your own boundaries all the time. But then, other people can really teach you something. You know, if you're trying to sing with them, or if someone brings a style.

It's O.K. to accept good fortune.

I don't know the reasons why something is intimidating to me or disgusting to me and I don't like feeling that way, either. I don't like it when something turns me off, on any level. So, its a matter of saying: Well, I can either sit here and reject, or I can do double-time embracing of something else just to reassure myself that I'm not against the world.

Sometimes we need to tell ourselves that we're not going to do certain things, just in order to stay sane.

You're making something that won't be what it is until some unknown date in the future. All aspects of the personal disappear.

One thing that the Internet has created is the sense that information is at your fingertips, when it's really only a very, very limited, specific, and slanted kind of information.

You make the world - with enough strength and enough luck you make the world that you live in. If you accept that there's participation to be done and an existence to be had - I tend to think there is only one way I want to go through this existence and that's with my eyes open and my chest out.

Every recording session and tour is a very valuable time to me in terms of getting to spend time with the musicians - whether they're friends and family or people I've just met - because I don't have a job where I get to interact with people everyday.

I want to be successful and I want people to hear the music and I want to make money at it, but if it isn't what you do, eventually it seems like that will cause you to not be able to do what you do. If you did that for a couple years, you would just become someone else, which is fine, I guess...but I don't want to become someone else. I want to do what I enjoy and what feels right.

Making money is awesome and fun as hell, but they're saying, "Well, you're offered a whole lot of money to do this," and it's like, well, I do want the money, but I don't really do that - like headline a big festival or something like that. I could go there and do that, but it isn't really what I do. It feels weird to me.

A vocal performance “Coming Together” is hard, but it's the kind of hard that if you work hard enough at it, you can do it and it feels great, because it was so hard. So we'll continue maybe even over the next couple of years to perform that and to expand our collaborative repertoire.

I think that America in general is piratical.

Every time we accept a paycheck for doing almost nothing, allowing us to live above the poverty line, we're engaging in piracy.