Will Oldham
Will Oldham
Will Oldham, better known by the stage name Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, is an American singer-songwriter and actor. From 1993 to 1997, he performed and recorded under variations of the Palace name, including the Palace Brothers, Palace Songs, and Palace Music. After releasing material under his own name, he adopted the "Bonnie 'Prince' Billy" moniker for the majority of his output since 1998...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionFolk Singer
Date of Birth24 December 1970
CityLouisville, KY
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
Cities are made for enemies to destroy.
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.
It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess.
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.
The songs are not meant to be real life. They're meant to have a psychic - rather than a factual - bearing on the listener. It's rare that a song grounded in reality moves me because I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. Songs are made to exist in and of themselves, like a great James Jones or Robert Louis Stevenson novel - they're not autobiographical, and yet there's a reality in every single page. It's real life of the imagination.
I had a lot of time to myself, and I would listen to a lot of music, mostly music that I knew fairly well and had a relationship with. And I'd think, well, what is it that I've never been able to do that this person or people are able to do with this song? Why haven't I been able to do it, and what can they do that I wish I could do? And then I'd try to do that. I'd start each day getting into the songs, and I'd think about how I might get closer to this music that I love, but haven't been able to make before.
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.
I think most great actors have their own life trajectory, the character motion doesn't have anything to do with their life motion.
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.
There's nothing that compares to watching that final 17 to 20 minute sequence in one sitting. It fills you with a giddy energy watching that. Then, being gifted with the silence that follows...I've never had a theatrical experience like that before, I'm sure.
If we were making a record in Kentucky, there might be some more elements that recall a time, a place, or a relationship. Recording for the BBC you enter into this strange and wonderful, but kind of sterile, place with which you have no personal history, and that's the Maida Vale Studios at BBC in London.
You're making something that won't be what it is until some unknown date in the future. All aspects of the personal disappear.