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 OldhamThe 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 OldhamThere'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 OldhamThen 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