One might trace the same play of forces I tried to identify in the music of Cat Power in that associated with Will Oldham. Once again a music has sometimes joined itself to the individual who bears the name Will Oldham, but has done so in a way which must make him uncomfortable. I have written before of my admiration for the way he allows the name under which he records and performs to change; this is impressive: it indicates a great modesty before the work. But another manifestation of this same discomfort is manifest in the incautious remarks he makes about Bill Callahan – remarks he should avoid all the more because he knows what it is to become the locus of a terrible and wondrous birth: that if Bill Callahan needs to withdraw Will Oldham above all should understand the necessity of that withdrawal and the strength it gives the music of (Smog).
And then there are the remarks in interviews in suchlike where Will Oldham will speak of his admiration of Beatty’s film Heaven Can Wait or the film trilogy Lord of the Rings. Why this desire to appear normal? And why is this desire already a parody of itself, which does it laugh at the parody Will Oldham makes of himself when he pretends to be a ‘regular guy’. But these are, once again, a sign of an embrassment before the work, which is to say, the movements which traverse him and the others with whom he records (his recordings are a work of friendship). Compare him to Tarkovsky, who is more comfortable assuming the mantle of artist-prophet. But then Russia has a place for such artists (Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky …) – we do not.
Then there is a temptation to account for oneself, as Will Oldham did some silly writings recently published in The Observer about the genesis of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (I’ll put in proper links here soon). No explanations are necessary, and I think Will Oldham also knows this, which is why he scatters his recordings over different formats, collaborations and (now) rerecordings, which I have yet to hear. Yes, Will Oldham knows this and this knowledge sits uneasily alongside his public persona, the masks he wears because he is a singer and performer of great magnitude. These masks are not a sign of actorly self-indulgence but of the singular demand to which he has always responded (a response which splinters itself, which necessitates disarray, fragmentation …)
Nevertheless, writing this, I think to myself: I love Bill Callahan more. This is silly – why, after all, should one need to choose between one genius and another? Isn’t it enough that we have two such individuals? Isn’t it a great gift to think: these are my contemporaries? Nevertheless, when I think of (Smog), and particularly an album like Rain on Lens, which is always underappreciated, I think of words like truth and absolute. How spurious! And yet this music is driven, it is pushed out of itself according to some great and awesome force. It is driven, it drives itself – this is a music of a terrible urgency (a music of fragments, to be sure, but ones which are as if magnetised in the same direction; they do not point everywhere, which is what, perhaps, they do with Will Oldham). Bill Callahan is not a virtuoso – and that is his magnificence. In him, there is a need to write, to sing, to perform which is absolute. I will write, without justifying this claim, that the continuity from album to album, from song to song with Bill Callahan springs out of a source that will not permit him to wear a mask. When I think of Bill Callahan’s face I think of a void, the night, darkness without stars.
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