Will Oldham
It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess.
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.
It's nice to be able to backtrack and not be embarrassed by the music you used to listen to.
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.
I don't think that word - the word pirate - has any real meaning. Or it's something that's had meaning imposed on it.
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.
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.
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.
I really hate press.
It's O.K. to accept good fortune.
Sometimes we need to tell ourselves that we're not going to do certain things, just in order to stay sane.
I like rural areas.
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.
I think everybody works from a defensive position, for the most part, in the film industry.
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.
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.
Too much emphasis is put on American roots music when people try and place me. You know, I grew up listening to punk.
People are looking for fame or a focus, and I can't provide that.
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.
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.
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.
What is normally called religion is what I would tend to call music - participating in music, listening to music, making records and singing.
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.
I don't like the idea of being surrounded by hidden things; people you can't see in buildings and cars.
Cities are made for enemies to destroy.
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.
I figure it's okay to make certain rules, whether or not people despise you for it at the time.
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.
When I was a kid, I always thought that acting was going to be the way to go.
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Kind
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.Collection: Past
The songs are not meant to be real life. They're meant to have a psychic - rather than a factual - bearing on the listener. It's rare that a song grounded in reality moves me because I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. Songs are made to exist in and of themselves, like a great James Jones or Robert Louis Stevenson novel - they're not autobiographical, and yet there's a reality in every single page. It's real life of the imagination.Collection: Song
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?Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: Space
I had a lot of time to myself, and I would listen to a lot of music, mostly music that I knew fairly well and had a relationship with. And I'd think, well, what is it that I've never been able to do that this person or people are able to do with this song? Why haven't I been able to do it, and what can they do that I wish I could do? And then I'd try to do that. I'd start each day getting into the songs, and I'd think about how I might get closer to this music that I love, but haven't been able to make before.Collection: Song
I think most great actors have their own life trajectory, the character motion doesn't have anything to do with their life motion.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Taken
Frank Sinatra's never been handsome, but he's one of my favorite singers. Who needs looks when you have a voice and power?Collection: Voice
In the United States the government has become less important. So, it's democracy, but as each year passes it seems that the government plays less of a role in people's lives, and so they're living in whatever situation their employment imposes upon them more than they're living in a grand political system.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Voice
It's definitely important to be open enough to seize an opportunity when the opportunity is there.Collection: Opportunity