Talking with the Inscrutably Beautiful Will Oldham

Will Oldham

The coming shows are in support of his latest EP with Mick Turner, Get on Jolly. I spoke with Oldham recently on the phone.

I saw your last Bowery Ballroom show in June, which was great. This time, you're playing with Mick and Godspeed You Black Emperor. Have you heard them before?

No.

Oh, they're great.

Do you have any of their records?

No, I'm ashamed to admit I've only heard them on promos and Napster.

Don't be ashamed. You're a wealthier person for it.

Will it just be you and Mick Turner playing?

And my brother Paul will be playing bass and Jim White [of the Dirty Three] will be playing drums.

It's interesting to me that you've played with just about every important musician in the indie world, but especially focused on musicians from the Chicago scene. How did you get associated with those guys, and with Drag City Records?

There's always been a connection between Louisville and Chicago?just because it was the closest center of musical activity growing up. When I was a kid, we'd go to Chicago to see shows. There were better studios there, better venues. Usually national bands rarely came to Louisville, very rarely. Yeah, so we'd go up to Chicago, wherever we could sneak into.

So how did you start to work with Drag City?

Somebody gave me a Silver Jews record, and that's how I heard of Drag City. Then I wrote to them, and sent them some music, and asked them what they thought of the music.

And they liked it.

Yeah.

And is that how you hooked up with the guys from Slint? I know you played with them on your first full-length.

Yeah, no, we went to high school together, pretty much. They're all from Louisville.

So, do you find yourself in a community of musicians, out of that scene?

Somewhat. It's a community in constant flux, but it's a community, I have to say.

And have you worked much in New York, with people from New York?

Yeah, well, I started working with [Mike] Fellows [of Royal Trux and Silver Jews] pretty much when he moved to New York, and Matt Sweeney [of Chavez], who was playing guitar at the New York show, is also from New York. And actually the drummer at that show is Spencer Sweeney, Matt's cousin, who's a painter who works out of New York. And I've recorded a couple of times at a studio out in Brooklyn called the Rare Book Room.

It seems like the scene you've been involved in in New York has been mixed up with the literary scene there, too, like with Open City.

Right, which is mostly through David Berman [of Silver Jews].

Do you see the New York scene as more literary?

No, not necessarily, especially since Drag City started putting out books, and also since Rob Bingham, who was one of the main Open City people, passed away. It sort of shifts the dynamic away from that literary theme, because he was a focal point for that.

You had a poem in Open City. Would you like to do more writing?

I don't have any desire to do it, but if someone wanted me to, if someone wanted to commission me, for example. Like, someone asked me for that poem, but I don't aspire to writing books of any sort. If I had a patron and a potential audience, for example, but it doesn't seem like books are really where it's at right now. Berman pulled it off with a great book, but it doesn't seem like there are a lot of really great books coming out. Maybe. I just don't know.

Speaking of reading, Get on Jolly, your new album with Mick Turner, has lyrics adapted from Rabindranath Tagore [the 1913 Bengali winner of the Nobel Prize for literature]. How did you get into him?

I think I probably found the book in a Salvation Army somewhere, for 50 cents, and I liked it a lot. I don't know anything about it really, though. I have some really good records which are Bengali records, and I guess he was associated with a lot of the musical traditions that these Bengali musicians draw from, and so that felt good because I never know what these Bauls of Bengal are singing about, because they're singing in Bengali. So it was good to know that these words he was putting down had something to do with the way I felt when I was listening to the music.

Yeah, they're very beautiful, very ethereal, and they're also, I'd say, very positive.

Yeah, totally positive.

I think that really contrasts with your last full-length, I See a Darkness. One of the things I like about that album is it has some of your bleakest lyrics contrasted with your most melodic songs.

Yeah, I was sort of hoping to make them bleak enough that with some perspective it appears almost ridiculous. Ridiculous like, you know, at the end of a certain day, the only thing on your mind is how you can strangle yourself or how can you hang yourself, and that if you're standing 10 feet away looking at yourself, you might break down in laughter at how stupid you look, and how vain your attitude is at that moment. That's sort of what I was hoping would be part of it: that the bleakness is totally there, totally obvious, and totally valid, but that at the same time it shouldn't?it shouldn't take it to mean that the obvious way to end bleakness and depression is to do something drastic like take your life or drink for eight days straight.

And I guess that's also apparent in the way that the lyrics are pretty bleak, but you're still writing the songs. You're still making the effort to write the songs... You just had that title song covered by Johnny Cash. How did that come about?

[Matt] Sweeney had met Rick Rubin a week before that show in New York, and went up and introduced himself and told him he'd been playing with me, and Rick Rubin was like, "Oh, well, Johnny Cash just recorded 'I See a Darkness.'" And so Rick Rubin came to that show, and was sitting on the side of the stage. And afterwards he told me about it. I was very excited, and he said, "Why don't you come play piano on it?" And I just said, "Okay!" But I didn't tell him I couldn't play piano. So I called him a few days later, after just trying to settle down, and told him that I couldn't really play piano, but regardless, if nothing else happened, I'd like to meet Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. He called back a week later and said, "They're coming into the studio; why don't you come?" I went there, and Rick Rubin told Johnny Cash, "Well, this is the fellow who wrote 'I See a Darkness.'" And Johnny Cash said, "Why don't we work on that song some more?" He wanted to redo some parts of his vocal, so they had me do a guide vocal, and the two voices sounded good together, so they had me sing on the chorus.

Do you know how he got to hear that song? Is Johnny Cash browsing through the record stores?

I think he listens to a lot of music; I don't know where he gets it all, or why he gets it. I imagine that in this case, Rick Rubin was probably trying to think of songs that would work?you know, new music that maybe he wouldn't have heard yet. Johnny Cash said the first time he heard it was on a tape that Rubin made for him. He and June were sitting in Jamaica, and she said, "Johnny, you've got to record that song." That's what he said she said.

So what kind of music are you listening to now?

Well, right now I'm listening to some Bulgarian music. And, I've been listening every day to an old Roger Miller record called A Tender Look at Love, and right now I'm listening to Folk Music of Bulgaria, which I usually listen to in the afternoons.

Do you feel like this music affects what you're playing, and what you're composing? Or do you think that your music comes out of your head, and the music that you listen to is what you listen to?

I think that probably almost everything that I listen to has an effect on the music that ends up getting played.

Have you seen Don't Look Back, the Dylan documentary?

I saw it a long time ago, but I haven't seen it since it's been refurbished.

I think you should really see it, because what reminds me about you in it is that you, to a lesser extent, receive the same scrutiny as far as motivations as Dylan does in that video. Does that annoy you, that people are trying to obsessively figure out what your motivations are, what's in your songs, etc.?

I don't really feel it. I feel cut off from that, I think, or I feel like the life here or wherever I am has remained fairly private and non-intruded-upon. If people are doing that, they're doing it outside my awareness, I think... I'm not sure. I guess it's a little intentional, but it's also a consequence of the lifestyle that's been chosen along the way, even before putting records out. I guess sometimes people tell me when I go out, people are paying attention to what I'm doing...when I go out, mostly. But I'm usually unaware of it until people point it out. I guess once a girl came up to me and told me that when I lived in Iowa City she used to follow me around the grocery, and follow me around the city. But that was two years later that she told me that.

Maybe you project an intimidating enough air that she wasn't comfortable enough to approach you.

Or maybe she was like a wildlife photographer and felt that if she invaded me she wouldn't get to observe my natural behavior.

What are you working on?

Well, we're about to practice, because we're going to go to California and play a couple shows this weekend. And then we play the Get on Jolly shows in December. And then just a couple days ago, we finished making a new full-length record, but that probably won't come out until February or so, on Palace Records.