Top 50 Will Oldham Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Will Oldham

2. “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

3. “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

4. “There are a limited number of promoters out there who care about that. 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

5. “Yeah, it’s 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

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

— Will Oldham

7. “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.”

— Will Oldham

8. “To me, recordings are little fourth-dimension artifacts, because they already are representatives of past, present, and future, just inherently in their existence.”

— Will Oldham

9. “I felt so liberated when I first saw this 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

10. “I think most great actors have their own life trajectory, the character motion doesn’t have anything to do with their life motion.”

— Will Oldham

11. “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

12. “On days where I feel the karma is in balance I’m not afraid of death. And when I feel it’s weighing heavily on the negative side, then I get very scared and just think about eternal damnation and how unpleasant that would be.”

— Will Oldham

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

— Will Oldham

14. “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

15. “Frank Sinatra’s never been handsome, but he’s one of my favorite singers. Who needs looks when you have a voice and power?”

— Will Oldham

16. “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.”

— Will Oldham

17. “It’s nice to be able to backtrack and not be embarrassed by the music you used to listen to.”

— Will Oldham

18. “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.”

— Will Oldham

19. “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.”

— Will Oldham

20. “It’s definitely important to be open enough to seize an opportunity when the opportunity is there.”

— Will Oldham

21. “Too much emphasis is put on American roots music when people try and place me. You know, I grew up listening to punk.”

— Will Oldham

22. “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

23. “When you think like a hermit, you forget what you know.”

— Will Oldham

24. “When I listen to them, they’re like they were made as time capsules in the first place. You know that when you’re writing the song and recording the song, you’re already sending a message to the future listener, whoever and wherever and whenever that will be.”

— Will Oldham

25. “I was really looking forward to doing the thing that I do – I basically appear just at the beginning and at the end of the play – but when I got to opening night, I started to get really sad that that was the last time I was going to see the play as a spectator without actually being in it.”

— Will Oldham

26. “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

27. “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

28. “I was worried before I saw the play, 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

29. “Sometimes we need to tell ourselves that we’re not going to do certain things, just in order to stay sane.”

— Will Oldham

30. “I gathered all the different Peel Sessions recordings together – I did six or seven of them over the years – and listened to all of them. These definitely have at least a superficial relationship to each other because they’re all very spare.”

— Will Oldham

31. “I feel like, for me, reading Thomas Merton is like that. When you’re a ways into it, you’re five pages in, 20 pages in, 30 pages in, it seems like one of the more oxymoronic undertakings you could attempt.”

— Will Oldham

32. “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

33. “Sometimes they’ll 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

34. “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.”

— Will Oldham

35. “You’re making something that won’t be what it is until some unknown date in the future. All aspects of the personal disappear.”

— Will Oldham

36. “What is normally called religion is what I would tend to call music – participating in music, listening to music, making records and singing.”

— Will Oldham

37. “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.”

— Will Oldham

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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.”

— Will Oldham

42. “When I was a kid, I always thought that acting was going to be the way to go.”

— Will Oldham

43. “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.”

— Will Oldham

44. “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.”

— Will Oldham

45. “The less people present in an urgent situation that a moderately high stakes recording session can create – the less people there are in the room – the more openness there can be. These songs share that as well, in addition to just the obvious, basic starkness.”

— Will Oldham

46. “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.”

— Will Oldham

47. “I have a mantra that kind of explains my feelings on this subject, which is, “The past is the present is the future.” When you’re recording something, you’re making something that will exist in the future.”

— Will Oldham

48. “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

49. “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.”

— Will Oldham

50. “Cities are made for enemies to destroy.”

— Will Oldham