Will Oldham Quotes & Sayings

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? — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

Cities are made for enemies to destroy. — Will Oldham

I have a mantra that kind of explains my feelings on this subject, which is, "The past is the present is the future." When you're recording something, you're making something that will exist in the future. — Will Oldham

I feel much more physically connected to my voice, and I like the physicality of the voice, and how the voice can physically occupy a song. — Will Oldham

I like rural areas. — Will Oldham

I was really looking forward to doing the thing that I do - I basically appear just at the beginning and at the end of the play - but when I got to opening night, I started to get really sad that that was the last time I was going to see the play as a spectator without actually being in it. — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

All you do is you go back to that, and it feels like you're in a spaceship. It feels like you're in 2001 or something like that. It's massive and well constructed and highly technologically advanced and occupied by these wise scientists, engineers, and producers. Listening to it, it just doesn't sound like me - that's a younger self that didn't know who he was or what he was doing. I can't identify with a nebulous cloud. — Will Oldham

Writing songs is a profession; so it's not an attempt to take things from my interactions with other people and for some reason give them to a total stranger to listen to. I find it offensive to hear other people do that. — Will Oldham

I gathered all the different Peel Sessions recordings together - I did six or seven of them over the years - and listened to all of them. These definitely have at least a superficial relationship to each other because they're all very spare. — Will Oldham

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

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. — Will Oldham

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

I think everybody works from a defensive position, for the most part, in the film industry. — Will Oldham

Frank Sinatra's never been handsome, but he's one of my favorite singers. Who needs looks when you have a voice and power? — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language. — Will Oldham

I have more respect for somebody who points at his ideal - in this case, the ideal of the pirate - and then becomes something that's more radical, more exciting, more subversive than a pirate could ever be. — Will Oldham

Sometimes they'll have performances and invite me to be a featured soloist. I think that is what they call it in that world-"featured soloist." — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

Venues are all the same, all feel the same, these generic blank spaces. I like artists like Lightning Bolt-bands that go in and kind of change things every time, play on the floor, set up in the middle of the room. They go in and they reinvent the space every time, which I feel is like the kind of thing that should just be happening. — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

With women, you always have to make an educated decision to figure out what they're thinking. It's not one that's necessarily sympathetic, always. Of course, we're all human beings, but the gender thing is big thing. And a great thing. — Will Oldham

I don't think that word - the word pirate - has any real meaning. Or it's something that's had meaning imposed on it. — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

When I listen to them, they're like they were made as time capsules in the first place. You know that when you're writing the song and recording the song, you're already sending a message to the future listener, whoever and wherever and whenever that will be. — Will Oldham

To me, recordings are little fourth-dimension artifacts, because they already are representatives of past, present, and future, just inherently in their existence. — Will Oldham

There's nothing that compares to watching that final 17 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. — Will Oldham

I do an opening, and then I go up to the high balcony in the back and watch the bulk of the play, but then I have to leave my seat about seven to 10 minutes before the end of that final big scene ... and it's a bummer. — Will Oldham

I feel like, for me, reading Thomas Merton is like that. When you're a ways into it, you're five pages in, 20 pages in, 30 pages in, it seems like one of the more oxymoronic undertakings you could attempt. — Will Oldham

When you think like a hermit, you forget what you know. — Will Oldham

The less people present in an urgent situation that a moderately high stakes recording session can create - the less people there are in the room - the more openness there can be. These songs share that as well, in addition to just the obvious, basic starkness. — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

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

Yeah, it's 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. — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

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

I was worried before I saw the play, 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. — Will Oldham

I write a song to be recorded. And to some extent to be performed, but definitely more to be recorded than performed, because the recording will last longer than a performance. — Will Oldham

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

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. — Will Oldham

I really hate press. — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

For a long time I've walked through this world with the desire, like in Rear Window, to look into other people's lives because I know that there is a way in which I am the same as so many of the strangers that I see. — Will Oldham

When you're listening to a recording, you're supposedly listening to some aspect of the past in the present as you travel slowly into the future, but you also know there's a very strong likelihood that the future of that recording, whether you made it or whether you're listening to a Led Zeppelin record, is going to continue probably far beyond where you are. — Will Oldham

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

I don't like going to cities. I don't mind maybe being in a city sometimes for a few hours, but I pretty much don't like cities. I don't even like passing through them. — Will Oldham

I still make music. I still write music and I record music, I just don't trust music promotion [and] distribution right now enough to record a new set of diligently worked-upon compositions. I do trust the audience and the audiences very much. — Will Oldham

We always keep things very, very simple. We can make a respectable living playing a smaller room that somebody else couldn't, because they're spending a lot of money. If we can't get a show up and deliver with what we almost intrinsically have in our brains and our pockets, then I don't really want to do it. — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

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

Too much emphasis is put on American roots music when people try and place me. You know, I grew up listening to punk. — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

I valued the experience of making the recordings, and I value the performances contained therein, and I value so much of what they can represent. I also think they're a terrific listening experience. Putting them out this way was a way of trying to maintain and nurture the relationship with the audience and also shine a light on the recent past, because we are so apt to be forgetful as human beings that there was such a thing as a recent past. These are some of the reasons for making this record. — Will Oldham

I make the songs and part of making them is singing them. But what you hear is not me. It's the song. It's through me. — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

I don't like the idea of being surrounded by hidden things; people you can't see in buildings and cars. — Will Oldham

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

There are a limited number of promoters out there who care about that. 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." — Will Oldham

I felt so liberated when I first saw this 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. — Will Oldham

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. — Will Oldham

As a kid you learn that there are thinkers and there are philosophers and there are theologian, and I'd hear little bits of the ideas that these people pursued or developed or created and I'd be really excited. Then I'll start to read it and I think, "Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn't a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself." — Will Oldham

Whenever I see something that looks like it could be good - whether it's on vinyl, CD or cassette - if it's not too expensive, I'll take a chance. — Will Oldham

It's O.K. to accept good fortune. — Will Oldham

It's good when someone says, "Would you write a song for this purpose," or "would you record a song for this purpose," or "would you help me realize this song," again, for this purpose. — Will Oldham

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

If I give a little hint or clue as to where my voice could be going, that would [be] read. Because people can listen closely, you know, you can sit with headphones or you just concentrate on music, you can just hear, sometimes, the desires of the voice itself. — Will Oldham