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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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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
Writing
Realizing
Good
Says
Would
Help
Purpose
Song
Write
Record
Helping
Realize
Someone
Records

More quotes by 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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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.
Will Oldham
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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.
Will Oldham
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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
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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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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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Cities are made for enemies to destroy.
Will Oldham
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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
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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'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
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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
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I don't like the idea of being surrounded by hidden things people you can't see in buildings and cars.
Will Oldham
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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.
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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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
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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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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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It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess.
Will Oldham
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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
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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