Oldham - Songs of love and horror: collected lyrics of Will Oldham

Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. Copyright 2018 by Will Oldham All rights reserved
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Author photograph Dan Lubbers Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available ISBN: 978-0-393-65120-1
ISBN: 978-0-393-65121-8 (ebk.) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS for those who carve out space in life for music The music is made to express what we cannot say otherwise.

CHARLES DUVELLE, in conversation with Hisham Mayet

I wanted to be a better singer. I wanted to be a greatest singer. These song words here collected are some of what I thought would aid me in this venture. Some were meant to be sung low with a big open throat and others to be sung quick and thin, with equal resonance. Resonance is the goal of every song-maker, resonance to an audience, and first to the singers. If something is too specific, its light burns out quickly.

If the words are exceedingly oblique then the light never catches. The lines of a song get put together with the knowledge and hope that those lines will be sung very many times before theyre forgotten and disappear. The words themselves and how they fit together ought to intrigue and seduce the singer, and present little challenges that can be pleasurable for the singer to greet. And then what you feel when you sing... well, there are pathetically few songs that can come through without a sympathetic instrument to deliver them. so that all of these intangibles can walk among us and be welcomed as civilized and recognizable. so that all of these intangibles can walk among us and be welcomed as civilized and recognizable.

Right? In order for anger to be presentable, you have to cloak it in words. Lyrics demonstrate that we, as singers, are at least trying to get along. It isnt song-writing so much as it is song-building. Making up songs. I started into this line of work when it was plausible to make a life out of it. We made songs on one side of a line and on the other side was the audience, the listeners.

Anyone can make up a song. The challenge was in navigating the gate-keepers and getting a song in a suitable position for folks to hear it. My understanding of what I wanted to make had to do with the very individual experience of listening to performed and constructed recordings. When I got to know records and recorded music, the process went like this: we sought out music, we found music, we brought this music into our world and there we spent lots of time with it. It grew on us and became a part of us. It sat visibly and tangibly in our spaces and demanded some small amount of care to maintain.

So then when I started to be a maker of these things, I approached the endeavor with concern and with lots of attention. The records and recordings I loved were sloppy, raucous, demented, devastating, random, precise. What allowed the makers of such works to be able to bring such life to me? Here in this book are the lyrics for many songs. The lyrics could be called the bones of song at times, the flesh of song at others. I like to think of a song as something you can carry in your brain and then re-present its essentials to someone else using just the voice. This is because I am really only a singer with really only my voice; what guitaring I do is done with the awareness that the guitar signifies absent others.