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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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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
Time
Song
Songs
Unreal
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Doesn
Line
Recorded
True
Records
Joys
Real
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Work
Joy
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Cinema
Really
Space
Record
Hyper
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Exist
Surreal

More quotes by 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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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.
Will Oldham
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It's definitely important to be open enough to seize an opportunity when the opportunity is there.
Will Oldham
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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
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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, 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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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
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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 was really looking forward to doing the thing that I do - I basically appear just at the beginning and at the end of the 'The Glory of the World' 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
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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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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
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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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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
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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
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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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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
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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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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
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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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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