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

Categorized in : Brain Simple Pockets

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.

Will Oldham

church soul thinking

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

musician lying thinking

It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess.

Will Oldham

excess scarcity

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

internet kind

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.

Will Oldham

interviews trying way

I figure it's okay to make certain rules, whether or not people despise you for it at the time.

Will Oldham

despise figures people

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

pirate cases exciting

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

reading math book

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

singing song

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.

Will Oldham

player order people

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

pirate real littles

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

idiot sometimes mean

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

pirate real thinking

I don't like the idea of being surrounded by hidden things; people you can't see in buildings and cars.

Will Oldham

car people ideas

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.

Will Oldham

real song moving

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

festivals want fun

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

rain hair hands

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

adults kids thinking

Cities are made for enemies to destroy.

Will Oldham

cities made enemy

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

agents yesterday thinking