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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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Will Oldham
Age: 54
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
Making
Normally
Music
Tend
Would
Singing
Listening
Records
Called
Call
Religion
Participating

More quotes by Will Oldham

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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
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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
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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
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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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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
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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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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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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
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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
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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.
Will Oldham
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I figure it's okay to make certain rules, whether or not people despise you for it at the time.
Will Oldham
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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
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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.
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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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
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When I was a kid, I always thought that acting was going to be the way to go.
Will Oldham
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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.
Will Oldham
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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
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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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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