Will Oldham Quotes

I don't try to guess what a million people will like. It's hard enough to know what I like.

It don't matter if you put 'The Dance' out, or any old George Strait song. Someone is going to think that it's awful. You gotta be able to just sit back and kind of laugh it off and know you're doing exactly what you wanna do, and if people don't like it, then it's not really my place to tell them they have to like it.

I'm gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they're gonna like. It doesn't really matter.

I don't think about the audience, I don't think about what makes them happy, because there's no way for me to know. To try to think of what makes for entertainment is a very Japanese thing. The people who think like this are old-fashioned. They think of the audience as a mass, but in fact every person in the audience is different. So entertainment for everyone doesn't exist

I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write. That's my own taste. I prefer to stumble on it.

I always have a problem liking things that I'm told I should like. This has been the problem with most of the Wonders I have seen so far. The fact that this one is called the 'Great' Wall of China annoys me. I'll decide if it's great or not. It might end up being the 'All Right Wall of China' to me.

Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.

Some people like when it rains a lot. Some people like sunshine. The idea that there's one, all encompassing afterlife is strange. It doesn't seem to make sense because we're all such different people.

One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.

Please don't try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have -- I want it that way.

I don't think it's important for everyone necessarily, and I totally respect that because everyone writes differently.

I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.

Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.

I don't like to work in an office. I like to work in my house, to be among my own thoughts. The idea is for an editor to let his artist alone, let them be themselves, let them exchange their own ideas and you'll come up with something salable.

My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines. I'm not a student of the genre. I don't care what anybody else does.

It's kind of liberating to be able to bring your own ideas to things, but it's also a lot of pressure, it's like screenwriting on your feet.

Music, for the moment, has been this hidden thing for me. For the first time, I am master of something. I am not used by someone else, like in movies or pictures, where you always have the happiness or disappointment of knowing it's you seen through someone else's point of view. You go to see a film and half of the pretty scenes are not in it-the ones you liked. Living with this frustration all the time, suddenly music came as the best thing for me at home, where no one can tell you anything.

The idea that the reader is important enough to me that I'd tailor my words to either please or offend them always seems amusingly alien to me.

When the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order.

When I make records I have full control of everything and I know how it sounds before it comes out, with films it's outta my hands.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.

Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.

In the first two years of my career, there were a lot of restraints on what I could do. I couldn't wear certain colors of lipstick, like bright pink, dark pink or red; [my lips] had to be natural. Eventually, I stopped communicating with certain people at the label, and did exactly what I wanted to do. And that was to cut my hair, dye it black, change my clothes, change my sound. Really to just express myself.

Dave [Holland] plays the way he wants to play. And it's usually what's needed. You know, Dave is such a deep thinker. You can't tell him too much, else it might spoil his spirit, you know.