Will Oldham Want Quotations

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."

We always keep things very, very simple. We can make a respectable living playing a smaller room that somebody else couldn't, because they're spending a lot of money. If we can't get a show up and deliver with what we almost intrinsically have in our brains and our pockets, then I don't really want to do it.

Making money is awesome and fun as hell, but they're saying, "Well, you're offered a whole lot of money to do this," and it's like, well, I do want the money, but I don't really do that - like headline a big festival or something like that. I could go there and do that, but it isn't really what I do. It feels weird to me.

Then 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.

I do not want a personal relationship with my fans. Or to do anything that encourages them to think they have one with me. They can have a personal relationship with my songs. That's fine, but they don't know me.