Latest Will Oldham Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• For me, promotional thing about some new album coming out destroys a lot of the excitement of making records. Records, movies, books - they're not supposed to be like math books. The purpose of them is to kind of take us out of ourselves and give us some sort of alternate experience or respite. To try to maximize the relationship of listening to a record through promotion is like experiencing driving a car by reading about stimulus programs. It kind of defeats the purpose.

  Will Oldham

  Book, Reading, Math

  Source: www.avclub.com

• 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

  Kind, Internet

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I've never done a video where I feel like the images have anything to do with my song, except in the most vague way possible, because I feel like the song is its own complete thing. But ideally, a song is a complete sphere like the Earth, where if you were an alien with a huge, huge finger, you could stick your finger into the middle of the ocean and make an impression on it. It’s not an impregnable sphere, but it is a sphere.

  Will Oldham

  Song, Ocean, Done

  Source: www.avclub.com

• 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

  Exercise, Purpose, Strange

  Source: www.avclub.com

• The sense of waking up in the morning and knowing that there is music ahead of me in the day is such an incredible feeling. The more I engage with music the more days I wake up and know that that's what's going to be there, and the things that come with music.

  Will Oldham

  Morning, Feelings, Wake Up

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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

  Book, Reading, Thinking

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• I don't know the reasons why something is intimidating to me or disgusting to me and I don't like feeling that way, either. I don't like it when something turns me off, on any level. So, its a matter of saying: Well, I can either sit here and reject, or I can do double-time embracing of something else just to reassure myself that I'm not against the world.

  Will Oldham

  Feelings, World, Intimidating

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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

  Perspective, Choices, Preparation

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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

  Eye, Thinking, Luck

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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

  Artist, Play, Space

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Space, Remember, Shows

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Past, People, Minutes

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• There are a limited number of promoters out there who care about creating music. You rarely meet a promoter who's like, "I want to be responsible for the best shows, I want to make sure that these are the best shows these audiences have ever seen."

  Will Oldham

  Numbers, Who Cares, Want

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I want to be successful and I want people to hear the music and I want to make money at it, but if it isn't what you do, eventually it seems like that will cause you to not be able to do what you do. If you did that for a couple years, you would just become someone else, which is fine, I guess...but I don't want to become someone else. I want to do what I enjoy and what feels right.

  Will Oldham

  Couple, Successful, Years

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Simple, Brain, Pockets

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Mean, Idiot, Sometimes

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Thinking, Yesterday, Agents

  "Will Oldham’s Fourth Dimension". Interview With T. Cole Rachel, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 10, 2016.

• 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

  Fun, Want, Festivals

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Dream, Song, Writing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Song, Writing, Purpose

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Thinking, World, Sometimes

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Writing, Awkward, Tunes

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Couple, Hard Work, Years

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I felt so liberated when I first saw Charles Mee’s 'The Glory of the World' at BAM play, because for me this is the gateway to contemplation, or this is the gateway to love, or this is the gateway to faith, not sitting and reading a book by an isolated monk, god bless him. This is.

  Will Oldham

  Book, Reading, Play

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Thinking, Play, May

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com