WIll Oldham

man dont be such a raincloud w/raincloud shoes

well, plus, that looks like a woman in the picture, doesn't it? african eunuchs were african men turned into eunuchs no? to guard harems and stuff. usually slaves brought from africa to places like persia and the like.

although i guess that could be a man. i thought it was a woman when i first looked at the picture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjD1VoYTNMI

Jacques Renault from Twin Peaks in a supporting role as well.

The BPB/Trembling Bells record is my fave thing of his of the last few years.

Such a vast catalogue but so much of it is unmemorable. Really hard to sift through.

agreed

and may god go with you both

owch

The collaboration with Rian Murphy (All Most Heaven), the Amalgamated Sons of Rest, the solo stuff, the twisted stuff, the appearances with Matt Sweeney, Andrew W.K., the Haggard cover record; etc. etc etc.

This gent is on point.

last one I got was Beware, which was good... but at that point I felt like I owned enough of his records, and now a few years have gone past without me checking in there's not much motivation to go back to the 9 (!) albums i've missed to work out which are worth it

Had a dream I heard the new one. It was relentlessly avant garde and came with a VR outdoor game, which was one part deliverance style horror but with a bunch of hippies drinking screwdrivers.

Beware is also the last one I bothered with, tho I love the one with cursed sleep

last one I got was Beware, which was good... but at that point I felt like I owned enough of his records, and now a few years have gone past without me checking in there's not much motivation to go back to the 9 (!) albums i've missed to work out which are worth it

I've only really kept up with his 'official' releases since Beware (i.e. not the collaborations or the vinyl/cassette-only stuff) but the most recent (?) one, 'Singer's Grave A Sea of Tongues' is really very good imho.

I haven’t picked up any of his new stuff either but I would definitely see him live whenever he’s in town. I think he’s starting a tour now with a nice band backing him.

One that I return to is The Wonder Show of the World from 2010. "Troublesome Houses" is one of his best songs imo.

Will's oral history behind 15 songs that are featured in his new lyrics compendium:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/will-oldham-my-life-in-15-songs-723480/palace-brothers-i-tried-to-stay-healthy-for-you-1993-724078/

excellent, thanks

Any thoughts on "Songs of Love and Horror"?

(Seemed bizarrely expensive at the place where I'd normally buy from).

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Living in or near Louisville KY is also beneficial

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I could really use a CD80 / POX or something covering the best of his output from the last 10 years or so. I lost track after The Letting Go.

SoLaH is a very pleasing listen to me,,, nice re-workings

Was having a drunken wander around Oxfordshire farm tracks, listening to "Sings Palace Brothers" on my MP3 player and my various thoughts included a) if Oldham releases an album, how many is he likely to sell (and what does that equate to in income for him?); b) he seems to do the "releasing lots of music" in a more dignified way than Kozelek; c) SoLaH sounds like it involved very little effort (though may have done) - does that matter?

Obviously, on my walk I had far more interesting thoughts than that but here isn't the place.

Oldham hasn't released any original material for quite a while

Has anyone seen the book? Is it annotated?

took over Drag City's Instagram account for the day and is currently posting a bunch of pictures of creatures like frogs and stuff flattened dead on pavement.

thanks?

right? i guess i just don't appreciate his art, man.

This is even more abrasive then when Olzone took over the Third Man insta and posted a bunch of memes about how grumpy Jack White is

He's extolling the virtues of Crocs on twitter.

The GQ piece with him and Sweeney is a hoot, but this story at the end is ace:

There is a recurrent subgenre in Oldham's work where he revisits and reinterprets a catalog of music, usually music that is fairly obscure. An example is the album he released in 2013, along with singer Dawn McCarthy, of lesser-known Everly Brothers songs, What the Brothers Sang. A while after it came out, his record company let him know something odd—that one song, “Devoted to You,” was doing hugely better online than any other song on the album. Better, in fact, than pretty much anything on the label. And they couldn't figure out why.

Oldham decided to try some experiments. Theorizing that maybe it was because “Devoted to You” was somewhat of an outlier in that it actually was a hit for the Everly Brothers, he decided to test out some other cover versions. He recorded and released his takes on modern country hits by Luke Bryan and Tim McGraw, hoping to repeat the success. Nothing. Now he was in full swing, so he turned his hand to contemporary modern pop and R&B hits by Drake, Ne-Yo, Kesha. Still no response. On the off chance that the success of “Devoted to You” might be down to a confusion with Olivia Newton-John's Grease hit “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” he recorded “There Are Worse Things I Could Do,” another song from the Grease soundtrack. No. “Just wanted to see if folks loved buying big songs,” he says. “It was a lot of fun doing all those, but nothing worked.” And the mystery of why one song had done so well in the first place remained unsolved.

A year or two later, a neighbor in Louisville put a note on Oldham's windshield. What she wrote was this: She was a keen practitioner of Jazzercise, and a song of his, “Devoted to You,” was part of their official warm-up routine. She was leaving the note because there was an upcoming event for Jazzercise instructors in town, and she wondered if he was available to come and play the song.

When Oldham tells me this, I must confess that I harbor some suspicions that I am being spun some kind of yarn here. But I check into it, and I am shamed for my doubts: “Devoted to You” is indeed the final song on the Jazzercise playlist R3–13. It comes directly after Britney Spears’s song “Ooh La La,” from the movie The Smurfs 2. Its appearance on this playlist is, it seems, why the song had become mysteriously popular. And that, one might assume, is where this story should end: a weird tale about where music does and doesn't find a home in this strange modern world.

new record is really great, really all over the place. the lyrics are wild and weird and funny.

xp That’s a really cool anecdote… But wouldn’t he have (hopefully) received Jazzercize royalty statements that would’ve tipped him off?

(or does Oldham have uncashed $70,000 checks lying around his pad like Ty Webb)

Maybe they just got folded into his regular streaming and radio (lol) royalties? He knew it was a hit.

I'd imagine Jazzercise pays in to BMI

I'm enjoying Superwolves... it has a mellow, 40-something dad vibe (which I guess fits my own vibe).

the lyrics are wild and weird and funny

God can fuck herself
And it does, hardcore