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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

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Will Oldham
Age: 53
Born: 1970
Born: December 24
Actor
Guitarist
Musician
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Songwriter
Television Actor
Louisville
Kentucky
Joseph Will Oldham
Bonnie Prince Billy
Bonnie Prince Billy
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More quotes by Will Oldham

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It's nice to be able to backtrack and not be embarrassed by the music you used to listen to.
Will Oldham
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I think most great actors have their own life trajectory, the character motion doesn't have anything to do with their life motion.
Will Oldham
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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
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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
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I am thrilled at most corners that I turn walking down the street, I'm thrilled by most pages I turn when I'm reading a book thinking of what it's going to show and what it's going to make possible for tomorrow.
Will Oldham
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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
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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.
Will Oldham
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Sometimes we need to tell ourselves that we're not going to do certain things, just in order to stay sane.
Will Oldham
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Will Oldham
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Sometimes the ensemble 'Eighth Blackbird' will 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
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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.
Will Oldham
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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.
Will Oldham
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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
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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
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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
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As far as implying that we know what we're doing, that we have perspective enough - by diving fully into something it requires a lot of denial, and denial is always dangerous even if all of your intentions are good and all your preparations are good. When you make a choice you're denying an infinite number of other choices.
Will Oldham