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 still make music. I still write music and I record music, I just don't trust music promotion [and] distribution right now enough to record a new set of diligently worked-upon compositions. I do trust the audience and the audiences very much.
When you're listening to a recording, you're supposedly listening to some aspect of the past in the present as you travel slowly into the future, but you also know there's a very strong likelihood that the future of that recording, whether you made it or whether you're listening to a Led Zeppelin record, is going to continue probably far beyond where you are.
You're making something that won't be what it is until some unknown date in the future. All aspects of the personal disappear.
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.
All you do is you go back to that, and it feels like you're in a spaceship. It feels like you're in 2001 or something like that. It's massive and well constructed and highly technologically advanced and occupied by these wise scientists, engineers, and producers. Listening to it, it just doesn't sound like me - that's a younger self that didn't know who he was or what he was doing. I can't identify with a nebulous cloud.
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.
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.
We airbrushed satin to make it look like chinchilla fur, ... We used silk and synthetic threads to imitate ermines and fluffy fabrics and then used silk chiffon and quilted it to look like sheared beaver.
We airbrushed satin to make it look like chinchilla fur. We used silk and synthetic threads to imitate ermines and fluffy fabrics and then used silk chiffon and quilted it to look like sheared beaver.