Category: Will Oldham

The Cult of Impersonality

A sketch of a thousand posts instead of a post.

Who is a teacher, a real teacher? One who will awaken you to what you already know, like Socrates with the slave boy, or one who awakens you to what you could not know?

For Zen monks, the priests of The Upanishads and mystics of all traditions, the idea is not to make present what could be communicated directly, but to confound, to let the pupil remain with the puzzle. Here, the teacher must be careful to reserve himself from the relationship. In some way, he must retain the position of the Other, where this names an individual who is not on the same level as those he teaches.

This is not a personality cult, but quite the opposite: a cult of impersonality, where the teacher’s learning, personality and expertise bear another kind of relation. An ethics of teaching would focus on the way in which the teacher keeps watch over this relation.

Will Oldham’s relationship with his music also reveals an ethos. His avoidance of any cult of personality, any stardom is not simply reclusiveness. The way he presents himself – for he must, in some way, present himself as a performer – is marked by a withdrawal, a black hole, that seems to draw his recordings across its event horizon.

A Common Approach

How should we understand this ethos? Perhaps we should look to what Will Oldham tells us of his life.

Will Oldham tells an interviewer how, ten years earlier, he decided to quit his acting career. He rang up his agent and told her he’s leaving the business, and then goes travelling instead, drifting with no particular plan all the way to Prague. And then, possessed by a kind of unease, he heads back to Kentucky, and wanders what to do with his life. Was it then he decided to become a musician?, the interviewer asks. It was then he decided to become a pirate says Will Oldham, and recalls, rather wonderfully, immediately enrolling on a sailing course.

Can we really be sure he wanted to become a pirate? Isn’t this a way of saying something else? Likewise, when we hear of his long trip through Europe, are we to understand this literally, or as a kind of allegory of his own artistic journey?

Reflecting in another interview on his attraction to piracy, Will Oldham emphasies a pirate does not exist before the act of piracy – that it is the act, usually undertaken secretly and incognito – that allows the pirate to be identified as such after the fact. ‘Around the same time that I was thinking about all this’, he says, ‘I remember getting a letter from a friend, and he had determined in this letter who he was. And I think that stalemated me for a little bit. In my thinking, you were as much what you were becoming as what you were. Or rather, I had to do something in order to be who I was’.

Then piracy, like wandering was a journey of self-discovery that was also an escape – but only insofar as the self is understood as a verb, and which can only be fixed retrospectively as a noun. What matters is to escape from the noun, to live in the present as in the future anterior – to speak of what I will have been rather than what I am.

Then Will Oldham’s work is not to be understood in terms of expression of a constituted self. The music does not belong to him as an individual – to Will Oldham who lives in suburban Louisville, taking his cowboy boots to a cobbler or returning Japanese art movies to the DVD rental shop – but to someone who exists as it were alongside of him. If there is to be a genuine becoming – if he is to continue to become other to himself through music, and let his audience become other too -, he has to reinvent not only his music but also his own persona.

What matters is to become. Isn’t this what Kafka marked when he spoke of the liberation that followed for him when he passed, in his writings, from the first to the third person, from the ‘I’ to the ‘he’? Now the narrator is enclosed in the narrative; Kafka is no longer the storyteller, but who is? The ‘he’ that awakens in the work. Certainly this song is narrated from a particular perspective, but beyond this song (and we would have to listen to the other songs on this album), is the ‘he’ of the singer.

Is this why Will Oldham has released his music under a stream of pseudonyms? The name Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy? ‘Its got the Wild West, the Billy the Kid thing and the Celtic thing’, he says. But it has more than that – it is a way of naming as Palace Music, Palace Brothers did before it – the ‘he’ enclosed by the song and by the necessity that lays claim to his music.

Cynicism, Opportunism

Of course, one might suspect that it’s all an act: Will Oldham was not born in the mountains of Appalachia, they might say; he only took up music after playing a child preacher in John Sayles’ Matewan who sings old time music. He’s a fake, you can say. He’s putting us on. You congratulate yourself – in the end the performer is a cynic like you. The performance is either to be laughed away – ‘he’s only fooling around’, or appreciated as clever showmanship. Here the projective space in which the performer is enclosed is one that sees cynicism and opportunism everywhere.

But what if there is a way of being claimed despite that projection and of answering the music? A kind of counterprojection from the music itself, that slips under the outstretched nets of cynicism and opportunism?

Will Oldham says he is looking for people he says ‘to seek out my music. Because that’s what I do every day – seek out new stuff. I like it that the audience and I have some common approach to what’s going on.’ A common approach – but one that does not involve direct personal contact. ‘I do not want a personal relationship with my fans,’ he says, ‘Or to do anything that encourages them to think they have one with me.’

This is the relationship he wants with his audience – a common approach, an approach held in common insofar as each is given to a movement of becoming. Will Oldham does not want personal relations with his fans, but rather a mutual becoming, enabled by the music. The music, one might say, is the third term in the relationship between Will Oldham and his fans, setting itself back in relation to both parties. This setting back is experienced as a kind of claim, a vocation. Will Oldham is called to perform just as his listeners are called to listen.

Of course, there must indeed be some kind of choice over his performance – whether, say, to play guitar or autoharp, whether to work with this or that collaborator, etc. – but these choices, for the performer in question, emerge out of a kind of necessity that is implicit in their relationship to their work. Sometimes, what you create is greater than you. Or rather, your creativity places you into relation with what is thereafter placed in your care.

And likewise for the listener, it is the way in which the music sets itself back, retreating even as it enables the relationship between Will Oldham and his audience: it is its condition. But a condition that sets free each of its terms with respect to their becoming who they are. What matters is the movement the work of art sets in motion. On the one hand, Will Oldham can continually subtract himself from the ideas others project upon him and his music. On the other, his audience can be subtracted from their own sense of who they are as listeners.

Genius

‘She has a gift.’ ‘He has a calling.’ This is what we might say to someone who has a beautiful voice, or has particular ability of an instrument: look after your talent, don’t waste it. To give such advice is to understand the faculty or ability in question seems to separate itself from the ordinary course of a life.

Perhaps faculty is the wrong word if it is to be understood on the same level as the other abilities you might have. There is something about excessive talent, genius, whatever we call this that separates itself from those abilities, seeming to withdraw itself. There is a difference in level between this faculty and the unfolding of one’s ability to be able, one’s can-do (a phrase I take from Heidegger, roughly translating Seinkönnen).

The dangers of the discourse on genius or talent is that we understand this potentiality in terms of a superhuman power, which is still commensurate with Seinkönnen. Of the discourses that swirls around the great men of the tradition – Goethe or Beethoven, Dylan or Hendrix (I think of the myths that continue to circulate in magazines like Uncut) reveal a particular kind of humanism. When Feuerbach allows the human being to take the place of God, this is only to raise the human being to the status of a new God.

But there is another experience of what we might name here (rather abruptly) as the holy. Here, we might think of the work of Hölderlin, or the broken, unfinished works of the romantics over which Goethe sighs. Here, long before Feuerbach, we see the beginning of a great shift. No longer is it necessary to uphold any idea of genius or even talent: the human being is not made in the image of God.

What matters instead is the minimal shift that allows the artist to be claimed by a kind of fragmentation, a sense of falling away from the ‘I’ who would speak from a tradition to the ‘he’, to the ‘she’ (but ultimately to the ‘it’) – a fall that calls for an ethos that seems to answer the work itself.

A Time of Need

‘… what are poets for in a time of need? / But they are, you say, like those holy priests of the wine God / who travelled from land to land in the holy night.‘ By what right, though, may we compare Hölderlin and Will Oldham? Hölderlin, it may seem, belongs to the great tradition; he looks back to forebears who are monuments of European civilisation. And perhaps there is the brilliance of the poetry itself, and what it has meant to other great European figures.

The comparison, then, overwhelms Will Oldham, who is, in a sense, quite ordinary, one of us. But here we might have to alter Proust’s formulation to say that though a genius may inhabit an ordinary man, with Will Oldham, the ordinary is also in some sense his genius. He is not removed from us as a great figure, but is among us, one of us, in the same manner, perhaps, as Josephine, in Kafka’s story, belongs among the mouse folk.

But there are peculiar similarities. Hölderlin admires Pindar (from whom comes the phrase, ‘become who you are’), and translates his works. But he lacks the ready made audience who Pindar addressed, and has to conjure for himself an imaginary Europe, creating a great myth (which Heidegger would later render literal) that reveals not so much his belonging to the tradition that flows from Greek antiquity, but the way we have been broken from it.

Likewise, in a sense, for Will Oldham, whose music might seem to belong unproblematically to the idiom of country music and blues, but of course cannot belong to any of these idioms just as, as we now know now, the genres of blues and country music do not belong to themselves. These traditions were fabricated – they were never quite there, never in phase.

It is this being out of phase which can reveal itself now not as a contingent event that happened to blues or country, but to what allowed them to be constituted as genres. This ‘now’ is simultaneously a time of need – not simply the wandering or scattering of tradition, but of tradition as wandering or scattering. A ‘now’ that lets us seize upon that minimal difference which was the chance of a tradition as it can appear only in the wake of the dissolution of the tradition.

(It is not simply that each tradition, each genre slips from itself, lending itself to hybridisations, but that tradition no longer has an ‘itself’, being the result of a kind of thickening or doubling up, a semblance created by marketing and journalism, by the need to classify and group. A semblance of genre interwoven with tradition ‘itself’ insofar as there was no ‘itself’, nothing in which it could come to rest, and nothing indeed to this ‘itself’ itself …)

Will Oldham is as displaced from the fantasies of the richness of a country or blues tradition as Hölderlin is from Pindar – and as each of us is from any simple notion of belonging to a people or to a tradition. And even folk music is one genre among others; its life depends not upon following what is already given as a tradition, but of retaking it anew, reawakening it – and reawakening it as a reawakening, exposing the fact that it was never anything else but a series of repetitions – and allowing it to breathe in the rebirth of a genre (of the genre, of tradition as nothing other than a series of rebirths).

The Dream of the Archive

It may seem that in a certain sense, the vanguardism of pop and rock has worn itself out. Now that everything is available through peer to peer networks, it is as though a river has issued into the sea. All music is co-present, all of it available, and gone are the old prejudices that would elevate high over low art. This may appear to be a version of Malraux’s ‘imaginary museum’ – everything is present, but at a distance from us, being set behind varnish in dizzying profusion. We feel a ‘museum sickness’, being first of all amazed that everything is obtainable, then a little bored, then, finally, indifferent.

Phonography uproots and stirs up the dead in a time of need, letting what is enclosed by the archive to happen again, but now in a different sense. To retake says Kierkegaard, is not to reminisce – not, that is, to remember the past according to the measure of constituted identities, but to repeat what never happened in the past.

A whole discourse associated with the art music tradition has crumbled like cliffs into an encroaching sea. The great names already canonised in rock and pop are joined by forgotten others, but by what has been forgotten in those same great names. Minor albums, neglected songs, byways unfollowed come forward in the vast, glistening sea of the archive. The past can engage us in its infinite differentiation.

Then there is no need to read Will Oldham as representing a lost past, an old wierd America; certainly, one might hear in his music the open-throated Pentecostalist, the leaning-together of bluegrass voices, the ballad voice which reminds us of blind destiny; but as he protests, he was as much a listener to Dinosaur Jr. as to Jimmie Rogers. In Will Oldham, the musical archive discovers itself anew. Or the artist is only a dream of the archive, produced from deep within its unconsciousness. A dream, then, a phantasm not of the sleeper who will wake and stretch his arms in the morning of a new tradition, but of a dead man who will never wake, like the poet of Basho’s haiku.

Modernity

This is the modernity of a figure like Will Oldham, that hides itself to the extent that we enclose his work within genres whose existence seems to be self-evident. Like Hölderlin, he exists on the other side of a great divide, one that came later to music (and perhaps to cinema) than to other arts.

For Will Oldham as for Hölderlin, there is no substantive community; both will have to improvise an ethos that’s otherwise missing. The difference with Hölderlin is that the same sea of music in its endless profusion is trawled by the nets of the entertainment corporations. Great lights are shone across the surface of the water, and for the artist who wants to do more than appeal to a public dreamt up publicity machines and marketers, a practice of withdrawal is necessary; a plunge into the depths.

Will Oldham understands the need for withdrawal, for a kind of willed obscurism that resists the commodification of music. As in the famous Magritte painting, in which it is the back of a man’s head that is made to face us, he knows he can only present himself in his absence. Will Oldham must become Other if he is to honour his music.

It is this withdrawal that matters as it lays claim to Will Oldham’s music and to Will Oldham and his audience through that music. It can now be characterised as a relationship to the archive that counts as it is given in a kind of repetition. His is not the vanguardism of an absolutely new music, but a retaking of what has already happened, letting it happen again. His is a kind of fall into the past, or a way of letting the past fall into the present not from an exalted height, as if it were a question of recomposing Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones all over again, but from the falling that had already lain claim to it (think of Cat Power’s frail, broken cover).

Here, it is not a question, that is of what a performer wants or plans to do, but a kind of necessity, of a need implicit in the relation to music. This is explicitly marked in the simplicity, even primitivism, of Will Oldham’s playing, which we cannot listen to as evidencing a pure naivete.

Who can be naive today when everything, all styles, all musics have become available? And it is marked more strongly still in Will Oldham’s lyrics where, within an idiom with which we might feel ourselves familiar, he lets his lyrics be drawn into a new kind of play, where the word God is as though led by the hand outside the closed spaces of churches, mosques and temples. Or perhaps, in a strange sense, it does not signify at all, or rather, concentrates in some sense what reaches us as Will Oldham’s music in its withdrawal from cynicism and opportunism.

God Lies Within

Take the song, Pushkin from The Palace Brothers’ Days in the Wake. It’s a small music – this is a short song from a suite of short songs, the length of the album only 27 minutes, an intense, concentrated music. A voice that is somehow fatalistic or impassive.

Why ‘Pushkin’? Who does it name? Whose name is that of the great poet, the one who made a poetic language for the Russians? Perhaps it is a name for Will Oldham himself, who said once he wanted to record under the name Push. It begins:

‘God is the answer/ God is the answer/ God is the answer/ God lies within’.

These lines sung, stated in singing. As though it were necessary to defend God, or the fact of God. Reiterated: God is the answer. And then: ‘God lies within’. Above all within, in that intimate space closed upon itself and enclosed from the world. How necessary it is to defend that intimacy, and to know that God is there in that intimacy. That the answer is already there.

Then, repeated four times, ‘And you can’t say that I didn’t learn from you’. Four times, over and again. To whom is the singer singing?

‘And I will not have a good time/ But leave me just the same/ The statue marks the place here/ Where Pushkin stood his claim’.

The narrator wants to be left alone. Exclude him; he doesn’t want a good time. He is thinking about the statue – himself? – where the one called Pushkin took his stand, made his claim (I can’t quite make out the lyrics). Is he also Pushkin? The chorus again ‘God is the answer …’ Again, the entreaty that God lies within. It is not sung plaintively but factually. It is a fact that God is there, and one which must be sung again. Sing to reach God. Sing to remind yourself that God is there.

‘And I guess that she couldn’t tell me/ Because she found it very frightening/ And though a lead slug would have felled me/ Pushkin rides the lightning’.

The last verse. To ride the lightning – this is slang, I think, for dying in the electric chair. Pushkin dies, electrocuted. He has been punished, but for what? ‘A lead slug would have felled me’ – is Pushkin part of the narrator? An accursed part? And who is ‘she’?

The mystery should not be resolved. There is no key to this song. Someone is singing of God. Someone needs to remind his audience of God. Someone is dying. He is called Pushkin. And someone could have been felled. Violence is close to us, but so is the one who is called God.

Sincerity

Will Oldham’s lyrics do not signify quickly; they do not say, you are like me, or presume a shared language between musician and listener. The song is an interruption; at issue is not an experience of sharing, as if this would presume the commensurability of the terms of that sharing. But there is a way of sharing that incommensurability, as if it was in this that the impersonality of the Other that would allow musician and listener to be engaged by their respective becomings. I think this is marked by the sincerity that bears his music.

Here, it is not a property of the voice that is at issue, but what bears it; not particular signs or significations, but the fact of its address. Sincerity is a sense that something must be said; a kind of imperative. It is as present in a gentle, unassertive voice just as sings with a strident one. It is as yet untutored; there is in it a uncontrolled wavering, which nostalgists miss in his more recent work.

He whines, others will say; he sings out of tune. But perhaps the trouble is his voice is too much like our own – that is, to the voice of those who are non-singers, non-players. Close to us, however, he is also removed. This withdrawal is what laps forward in his songs as sincerity, understood as a relation that opens between musician and music and between audience and music.

God lies within – what does this mean? Shared between artist and audience is that doubling up of the world that occurs in the work. This might sound mysterious. We can think of it with Heidegger: there is a difference, he says, between being, understood as the horizon against which things come to appear, and beings, those particular things, people, which appear to us. Anything is more than it appears to be. Or rather, this ‘to be’ watches over the indeterminability of the experience of the world and gives itself to be experienced as the engagement in question.

But perhaps the horizon in question is broken by another relation (or rather, as Levinas will sometimes write, a relation without relation), by a kind of sincerity that bears music, and with respect to which even the most dour music is borne by a kind of hope. Is it naive to suggest that such sincerity escapes cynicism and opportunism? It is not that the artist is the Other, but the relation between the artist and ourselves as it is given in the work. The holy is not a place from which the artist speaks. It is that speaking, the address that occurs as the work.

Mutual Becoming

The Other is closer to God than me, says Levinas, who stands in a tradition of dialogism that we do not have to disavow because we think of ourselves as atheists. This is because the relation to the Other is accomplished as an act of creation, which breaks apart the horizon of the present. No longer a question of the ‘to be’, says Levinas, insofar as it is predicated on the self-perpetuation of the same. Creation comes from without, from the outside. It is not a question of becoming other, which remains a variation on the self (even when the self, like being is understood verbally, as it is for Heidegger), but of being opened to the Other.

But the reference to Levinas can mislead us, since, at least in his early work, he confuses the Other as it is given as a term and the Other as it is given as a relation. That is, he attributes to the Other what is given in the relation to the Other, providing a kind of double of the metaphysics of the subject he wants to overcome. (I will return to this criticism on another occasion.)

With Will Oldham, it is what speaks in his personae, the ‘he’, the ‘it’ that is Other, and not the singer himself. It is in terms of his relation to these personae that we have to understand Will Oldham’s life as an artist and his relationship with his audience, and not the other way round.

What would it mean to say that Will Oldham is closer to God than I am? That he is closer to living with the peculiar necessity of creation, answering to that becoming-other to which Will Oldham owes his existence as an artist. It is as if at the depths of himself he bore something completely Other, with respect to which he, too, is in the position of a listener. And it is the Other that also claims his listeners, joining them and Will Oldham in a ‘common approach’ or mutual becoming where each relates to the music as to the unknown.

What he creates is not ex nihio, from nothing, but a reawakening of the archive; he sings with everyone who has ever sung. He sings not from the past, but from the future anterior, from the needfulness of a relation to the future that escapes the projection of cynicism and opportunism.

Represent the past: it began with this, with X; it all started there. But where did it begin? Retake the past: it began now, today. Today – as the past gave itself again. As the old music becomes weird. As the new music is enweirded by the past. Retake it – receive what has never been received before as the past. Not the past received anew, but the new as the past, as the retaking that gives first of all what happened.

That’s what I hear on Time: the Revelator and the early Palace albums: the past, yes, but also the future – do not reduce either to their influences, for that is only to represent what happened as though it sprang from a set of causes, and ultimately a singular and determinable Origin. There is a music which scatters the Origin and scatters representation – by awakening, from the past, those series of singularities that were never before thus assembled.

But what are they, those singularities, those micro-events and part-happenings? The open-throated Pentecostalist, the leaning-together of bluegrass voices; the ballad-voice which confirms blank fate and blind destiny; the non-regular rhythms of Blind Willie Johnson; fragments of Anglo-Celtic folk: all this; and doesn’t Will Oldham protest that he was as much a listener to Dinosaur Jr. as to Jimmie Rogers?

In truth, it is not a question of Dinosaur Jr. nor Jimmie Rogers, if both would name a body of work, or even the musicking that work would ossify. Not Dinosaur Jr., but a sound that reached the ears of Will Oldham. And not Will Oldham, either – he is not even himself, but the one reinvented by the past. Reinvented – no, because there was no first time; this past did not exist.

Invention, and that from the first; retaking, and that at the beginning: what returns at the past had never arrived. What comes are those singularities arranged in new singularities, and according to new rules of grouping. Rules? Not even that – locally, provisionally, once and then not again, the past arrived from the future. For the first time – for the last time, the past claimed you from the future. I listened – what did I hear? ‘The Ohio River Boat Song’, taped from the radio in 1993. My past come again.

And with Gillian Welch? I had Revival, it is true; I already knew Hell Among the Yearlings. But Time: the Revelator? From the very beginning, I knew – but with what kind of knowledge? – that what had come by way of the first song, its opening, was the langour of the no-time, that was before and after life. After it – wise with a wisdom that sees all from death, that stares back and sings like the narrator of Sunset Blvd., but from before life, too – before the world came together.

There was no God, then; the skies and waters were undivided, and the stars had not been set in the sky. Nothing – and not even that; a rustling, a murmuring: the unbeginning without determination. From that past – scarcely the past; from the future – scarcely the future. From – and the present was turned aside from itself. From – and the flood came; I was not where I was; the river was where I could not step once.

Streaming – that in place of me, and revealing place to have been the usurpation – not, now, of anyone in particular, but of the no one who -sists when there is no one to be there. Wound, recording surface, what wrote itself in you was the past. That’s who I was – but who was I?

Absolute music! Or music that dissolved the terms of all relation! Can I call it immediate? Only if it names an event that reached me in the unknown past. Only if that past was the way the future arrived – or that the future arrived from the past. No Origin – and there is not even Gillian Welch, and not even Will Oldham. Non-Origin: by what courage was Time recorded with just guitars and vocals? By what immense courage was it set down in RCA’s Studio B?

And by what courage was Palace Brothers recorded in a kitchen on a cassette recorder? Days in the Wake – that’s what the latter album came to be called. In the wake – of the future that moves through the past. Of the past which comes from the future, just as surely, as lightly, as the wind which passes through the barley in the field when the Doctor turns from the dacha at the beginning of Mirror.

Are you writing of yourself? Barely that. Of music? Barely that.

If I call them the oldest songs, the obscurest songs, it is to set them into a past that did not occur. Songs out of phase with time, songs that seem to repeat in their lyrics, in their old-time sound, what was never recorded, not even in Harry Smith’s anthology. And even that phrase: old time music seems to miss them.

Old time, the wearing out of time – the past, now, is not an archive with an origin, with delimitable boundaries. There are no genres, and not even singers – only parts of song and half-remembered performances, only unrecorded records and the forgetting that wiped out memory in advance.

Will Oldham, how is it that you were older than time? How is it that you wiped time out? Perhaps because it was the name Will Oldham you wanted to wipe out, as surely as Bill Callahan wanted the word Smog whispered when he placed parentheses around it. Namelessness: it’s the songs that matter, says Will Oldham, not Will Oldham. Hence his changing names. How to call yourself nothing at all? How to drive away the name from music?

Old time: what returns with Will Oldham is what never occurred. How did he dream up his old wierd America? How did that America dream itself in him? The oldest songs, the obscurest songs: how is it you weren’t recorded until now? Because they are older than time, and older than memory. Was it forgetting that dreamt of you, Will Oldham? Was it oblivion that gave itself your name?

Around the grit that finds itself by chance in an oyster’s shell can form the pearl that is made of the inside of that shell. Alien particle, outside inside, how did you find you way into the heart of Will Oldham? Because what grew there was a pearl; what was dreamed there were songs too old for memory. Remember, heart, that splinter around which you came to yourself.

But that remembering is too strong for one man, and Will Oldham is a horde, not a man. Half-beast, animal half changed into man, how can you sing of what was always forgotten. Animal-songs, songs of wolf and lepoard, Will Oldham is a crowd, not a man. He falls asleep; the animals wake up. And when they sleep, he wakes up. Another America is waking with him. Old America, oldest America, archive of parts of beasts and parts of songs, how is it you stir yourself in him, Will Oldham? Because he is made of the old, wierd America; it is what turned itself out to make him. And will it turn itself inside out again? Will it leave him, Will Oldham? Will it strand him and strand us on the beach of the present?

Do not place your faith in names.  The songs, not the singer. Unrecorded recordings, unmade, unmakeable albums: how is it that your best work has never been heard? Because it is what unworks itself in your recordings, what turns them aside from every ear. Refusal: the songs retreat; they hide themselves in the past. Somewhere, far away, they are becoming animals again. Somewhere they are howling and running in the forests of the night.

Who are you, God, of the songs of Will Oldham? I can’t even remember them, those songs. I can’t remember – but I remember God, who, in these songs, has slipped from Himself. Is the name, God, for what unnames all names. Of whom does he sing, Will Oldham, when he sings of you, God? Of no one, I know that. No one: who am I, listening? No one yet. No one, even. Changed in my place by what will not lest me rest in my place.

Non-resting, streaming: God says: you are no one at all. Will Oldham’s God says: you are no one; nothing at all. And what does he say to him, Will Oldham: I am no one, as you, too are no one. Mask upon mask; and if his music, Will Oldham’s, belongs to the past, it is one which has never been present. Mask upon mask: it was never there, it never began, there was no Origin; the music rests upon nothing – or it is music, mask, all the way down?

And what of God? Who are you, Will Oldham’s God? For I share Him with him. Shared: mask of no one. Noh mask, blank mask, to whom do you belong? To drive away the face of God – yes. And when God’s face is the driving away of God’s face? When it is that face without face: the void, the mask of stars?

Why Will Oldham? What is uncanny about his singing? Trying to answer these questions and others, I run up against the apparent conservatism of song itself.

Does the singer’s voice ‘hold’ sound, fixing it? Does it compel instruments to follow it, confining them into to a regular metre and doubling or accompanying the vocal melody in its own melody? Does it, above all, arrest the becoming of music because of its sheer discursivity? A lyric signifies too quickly, and this is the trouble: the voice is thereby prevented from becoming another element of song, one among others in a democracy of instruments. You are like me, say the lyrics, and we speak in the same language. You love like me and laugh like me; our experiences are commensurable and measured by the same economy of sense. And the voice, too, is like our own; its timbre is accidental and singing itself is no longer sound, no longer intensity, but simply a vehicle of sense.

But what if there were a song where the lyrics withdraw themselves from this measure? Where what speaks is not an experience shared, if this would presume the identity of the terms of that sharing, but one which turns each aside from the community of good sense and common sense? What if the circuit of communication were interrupted thereby and forced forward was the singer’s voice as sound, as intensity, as that timbre irreducible to the general equivalent of what is called sense.

Wild sense, or sense freed from signification – wild sign that will not allow the singularity of the voice, the timbre of the singer to be substituted by anothers. Listening, you hear a voice that is not your own; you share nothing with the singer except that your voice, its timbre is likewise singular. A wildness compounded when the meaning of the lyrics withdraw themselves from the listener’s capacity to identify with their narrator. When they redouble sound as it flees from the general equivalent of sense. When it is darkness that is seen and sung about and the words are only the traces of a withdrawal that has already occurred.

Art music has known this for a long time; it would be easy to list those composers in whose music voice is an element of sound, or those improvisational practices in which a voice becomes pure intensity. Why am I drawn to the music of Will Oldham?: this is my question, and the one I’ve been trying to address for the past few days. And further: why am I drawn to it in the same way as I am drawn to Kafka’s writing?

Kafka’s prose is elegantly simple. It is a prose, Flusser comments, of a certain kind of official German – one now deliberately made to convey events unofficial. It proceeds calmly and narrates calmly, but because of this calmness, its apparent officialese, the strangeness of what it narrates becomes more intense. The tension is clear: clarity meets obscurity, the day meets the night …

And with Will Oldham? His music might recall a folk tradition; melodies and motifs are sometimes borrowed; sometimes you say to yourself: but I have heard this before; the idiom is clear. But as it were against this idiom, against a naive notion of the folk, of the vernacular, something else happens.

This is not so suggest that folk music is static or unchanging, that it would confirm the eternity of a people who never made it to modernity; folk already renews itself; it responds, it is responsive; it does not mourn the disappearance of a people so much as keep place for the one which may come to appear.

Will Oldham, too, transforms what he receives. He is not nostalgic, though his lyrics will seem to come from another time, from a language Old Testamentary as if he were still the child-preacher he played in Sayles’ Matewan, and a language, too, of an obscure people lost somewhere in the folds of greater America. But Will Oldham is not the banjo player from Deliverance and he is a man of the city as much as the boondocks. What has inherited? Fragments of older idioms, parts of folk and country, but parts, too, of punk and new wave, of those independent bands who toured America in trucks and slept side by side with their listeners.

All of this is alive in his music, and all at once. It is a world, it seems to belong to a world, to have been born from one. But what is this world? Not our own, for does not permit us to identify with what is sung. There is his voice first of all, and the drama of its breaking as he throws it against guitars playing in a key too high for him to reach. A breaking voice, a voice that tears itself into a kind of keening: a voice high and wild and strange, but whose strangeness is always set against what is also sung more calmly. Verses, choruses, reprises: there are these. There is a clear structure to his songs. A structure not to be broken but suspended.

There is a kind of wailing, a suspense – but one which depends on the structure of the song and of what is expected of singing. Will Oldham is not an outsider artist and an outsider singer, but he lets the outside sing in what is inside, he allows the song to open itself to forces which do not permit of identification. Forces which explicate the song, turning it inside out, or exposing how it was already made of strands of the outside and that all songs and all voices are similarly attuned: strings across which the outside sings. Aeolian harps played by the winds which cross from the outside.

There is nothing virtuosic about his singing or his playing. He is not Bjork, admirable for that of which her voice is capable and of the risks she allows it to endure. Will Oldham’s voice is nearly our voice, his playing nearly ours so that some will complain that he can neither sing nor play. He whines, some will say, he sings out of tune. His voice is like ours – non-singers, non-players – and that is the point. Close to us, he is also removed from us; he brings the outside near, even as the outside is always far.

That is his voice. But what of the lyrical content itself? I have written about it before. As W. wrote, objecting to this, why don’t you just listen to it and write of what you feel? No doubt. I suppose I was looking in those lyrics for clusters of indices, for what would provide images for the becoming of his singing, for names for its movement. What patterns emerged? Violence and obscurity; troubled intimacy and sometimes grace. Departure and arrival; secret places and hidden enclaves; the equivalence of the word God and the word fuck: all this is present.

What is figured in those lyrics? What sings through Will Oldham? What reaches us, his listeners, who are fascinated by his songs? I’d say only what removes them from the common currency of sense. What presses forward in sense and by way of sense, but escapes it. The unknown – is that the word? The outside? Only if it permits us to name that chaotic interval which breaks our present from the future. Only if it names that small apocalypse in which what is revealed is the depth of the night.

To become is to do so in lieu of a destination; it is to depart and, by departure, to welcome what is other and not-yet. It is to welcome what is to come, to what comes, as the singer of ‘a half-million murderers’, of ‘a long list of ironies’ (‘Meaulnes’).

There are many songs about departure on Days in the Wake. In ‘(Thou Without) Partner’, the singer sings of an apportionment and a leave-taking; the cookies have been cut, the severance has happened, and now it is time to leave ‘(adios fraternos’). He is leaving by night, the singer, even as he wonders that by leaving she (but who is she?) will return to him (when will she run to me?/ when will she come to me?). To leave is to receive and to receive is to change, to become.

This gives a clue to the meaning of departure on this album: it is a way of welcoming something. The cinematographer of the last song leaves the city and all that was good; ‘And I walked away from everything I leaned on/ Only to find it’s made of wood’; ‘And I walked away from everything I lived for/ Only to find that everything had grown’: these are the last lines of two verses. Note the singer does not say, like the narrator of Isherwood’s book, ‘I am a camera’, but ‘I am a cinematographer’ – one who does not just photograph movement but allows movement to reveal itself to an audience.

It is by leaving that the cinematographer is the name of the singer and singing becomes cinematography. To depart is to do so as a cinematographer, as a singer. What comes by way of departure is only the movement of the world, its becoming. A movement heard as song. This is the departure that permitted Days of the Wake to be recorded. The leavetaking that was met by the coming of its songs.

Some of the songs on Days in the Wake are addressed to ‘you’ – but who is the singer addressing? In ‘I Send my Love to You’, it seems clear: he is singing to his love, declaring what he has sent (my love, my hands, my clothes, my nose, my trees, my pleas …) and asking for ‘some’ to be sent back to him. What does he want? ‘Your ways, your call, your days’ – all of this.

The joy of this song is that of a kind of dismemberment. He will send himself in bits – but, too, he will send parts of the landscape (my trees) and even his own pleas (he would send his own song to her, sending his singing so it was hers in advance). Who is she? Like him, she is inextricable from a milieu, a world (your ways, your call, your days), a time-space she inhabits and which it inhabits itself in her as a kind of style. So the days become-her just as she becomes in her days (they are the site of her becoming). Who is she? In the end, a style, a way the world is, the way the world is reborn in her and by her coming to presence. Time and space are not the indifferent repository of a style, they are enstyled, experienced as styled. They are sung and they sing in and with the singer.

In the last verse, he sings of becoming-duck (My head is bleeding/ And I’m a duck); the lake cracks, he sings, as it hears him quack. The world changes; the cosmos transforms himself because of his loving, his sending and his singing. All three are equivalent; all three belong to the time of the ‘to love’, the ‘to send’ and the ‘to quack’. The laughter of this song is one of a happy dissolution, of that happy undoing through which the cosmos is released to becoming. Then once again, it is a matter of release, of attaining release through song, as singing. In song, in singing, the universe is deliquescing.

Listening to this song, I am reminded of another. In ‘Whither Thou Goest’, the song finishes: ‘Scream my name above the sun/ Above the engine’s carnal din/ Above the calves who bleed their lungs out/ Baa baa moo moo baa baa baa’. Is the last line the singer’s name? Is he the one who baas and moos above the beasts who die? Is he the condition of lowing and baaing despite the machinery of slaughter? Perhaps to sing, for Will Oldham, is also this: not just to commemorate the ones who were slaughtered, but to recall their living as it lifts itself above all dying. Their living – the song of their living – as though it resounded in the skies above the slaughterhouses.

Even this song is a song of joy. As though to sing is to receive by feedback the sound of one’s singing from the whole world, the whole cosmos. As if the whole cosmos sang in your singing and only increased the fervour of your singing. Until your singing body becomes the body of the cosmos as it is released into becoming.

Days in the Wake is an album whose becomings are marked in its lyrics. Whose lyrics, packaging and even the name of the band under which it was released are indices. To where do they point? To the singing itself – to the singing and the music. What are these indications?

The song of one in the corner who turns around and is burning. Do you see me burning?, he asks? He is the only one who knows there are wolves and awful things around. The first song is sung in the second person. Another is addressed, and there are others besides that other. The singer asks the addressee to blind them. He will burn, sings the singer, but the others should not see him burn.

As Steve writes, when you first hear this song, you may mistake the lyric for one of self-pity. But the clue is in the title: ‘You Will Miss Me When I Burn’. It is not called, ‘When You Have No One’ – it is not a song about loneliness but about burning and it is the song itself which is fire. The song enacts that turning around in which the singer confronts us in flames. He is burning. He has longed to be missed, and therefore real – he was obscure, unreal – but he is real only as he burns, which is to say, sings. But this song is the last song, because to sing is to burn.

What is the becoming of this song? A dying, a burning, the reaching of that ‘to sing’ which is linked to no one in particular. A singing of the dying and the burning, a singing of flames in the throat.

The next song becomes towards God. But which God? ‘God lies within’, it is sung. The singer sings of himself in the third person. The song is called Pushkin and it is Pushkin who sings. Over and again, the refrain, ‘God is the answer’ – as if it were difficult to find God. As if the stridency of the vocal is a correlate of the absence of God. Where is he? Within. But what is within?

Now Pushkin entreats a second person to leave him behind. ‘The statue marks the place here/ Where Pushkin stood is claim’. What does this mean? Perhaps the song is the statue. No, not the song as if it could be sung again, but this singing, the singing recorded in this performance. The song is the marker, but what does it mark? ‘And though a lead slug would have felled me/ Pushkin rides the lightning’: it marks the execution of Pushkin, the singer. His electrification.

Again, death – this time, death by execution. It is God, within, who sings and it is by his singing that Pushkin must die. And as with the singer of the first song, it is an extinction which comes from without.

Inextricable from the music of these songs is the persona who sings. The urgency of singing is marked in the lyric: these are songs which must be sung; they leave a statue in the place of the singer. The song is the testament. It grants a kind of reality to the singer. As though the singing were more than that of which the singer would be capable.

The third urgent song I want to remember is the waltz, ‘No More Workhorse Blues’. Another song addressed to ‘you’. And in this one, the celebration of a transformation. The singer is no more a workhorse. He is singing. The song reaches its climax: ‘I am a racing horse/ I am a grazing horse/ I am your favourite horse’. Is it in song itself the singer becomes such? Is it of a becoming-animal that he sings?

Not the imitation of the horse, but the becoming-horse of song, a transformation of horses just as it is a transformation of singing. To become-horse – what would this mean? Not an imitation of a horse, but the ‘to horse’ – the  infinitive which echoes the ‘to sing’: to sing is to become horse, to race or graze alongside horses. The singer sings of nothing other than his singing and the gift of song. Singing is his wealth (‘I am a rich man, I am a very rich man’), and the song is one of the triumph of reaching song.

It is not a metaphor which transports the sense of singing to that of becoming a racing or grazing horse. Singing and becoming-horse are one and the same; to bring singing into relation to horses, to burning or to riding the lightning is to figure the movement from the attempt to sing to singing itself. Then this album is equivalent in many ways to Kafka’s ‘merciful surplus’ – to the extraordinary surprise that singing is possible and that it can provide the singer with succour, with strength.

Perhaps that is already marked in its title: ‘Days in the Wake’ – days lived after singing was possible, after the giving of singing. Wonderful that this title came to Will Oldham only after the album was done and released. It was written only on a later pressing of the album (mine still reads: Palace Brothers). It is the album which gave itself to itself, in which Will Oldham lifted himself by his own bootstraps out of the ditch.

Of what does Will Oldham sing? What is it he allows to be sung? Lazily, without rereading the pages of commentary I wrote on the songs themselves, I remember how on I See a Darkness, there is always struggle, that enmity is close, that it takes a personal form (Black), that the same black is what friendship may guard against (I See a Darkness), that strange creatures are birthed inside us (Song for the New Breed). The song restages the struggle; it begins again. But the first song on the album also declares music itself as a place (A Minor Place) and, I wonder, that place of struggle. As though, on the album, Will Oldham was singing of singing and the difficulty of wresting song out from struggle.

Always the moving testimony of friendship and love on his albums. Adopt a kitten and if you cuddle it the cat it will become will be cuddly. Adopt an older cat and there may be no cuddles; it is only her head she will allow to be stroked; her body is off limits (the cat who lives in my parents’ house – the only cat I have known who could have been called mine, which is to say I was the first one with whom she had a rapport and to whom she went. Not any more, though). Was Will Oldham cuddled as a child? He admits in an interview he would like to be one who goes off alone, like, I imagine to myself, Snufkin in the Moomintroll books (but why did Tove Jansson solve the mysteries of his parentage in Moominpappa’s Memoirs?) – yes, he would like to be one alone, but when he travels it is always to friends. I wonder whether he envies Bill Callahan, who strikes me of one who loves aloneness.

Friendship, struggles, and a language which seems half-archaic, that lets speak in the awkwardness of its syntax of the syntacticality of language, which foregrounds the strangeness of grammar and how grammar determines meaning and orientates sense: this is what sings on Will Oldham’s album. It is what song allows to be sung; it is song itself which sings through him as it reaches back into the history of song (so many streams run together in his singing) and leaps out of that history. But to where does it leap?

I have wondered whether it might be said that music is divided in itself, riven? That along music, along its body, there is something like a cut? But it is not the body of music which is cut; music is the cut – the blazing line from which music wells. Music is the split in the earth and the magma; it emanates from itself, out of itself; reborn is what music is, its origin. But what if the rift itself were the origin of the same world into which music pours? What if it is also a world that originates with music and the origin, the rift, sets itself back into being?

When Heidegger writes on the temple in the rock cleft valley it is to celebrate what begins there, the way a people and their destiny are gathered by the temple such that their history might begin. The god is in the temple, and nowhere else, he says. The god is there, in the temple cella. I have always liked to write of gods. The Greeks knew no such thing as religion, Heidegger writes in the Heraclitus lectures. No religion – but there are gods, the ones who see us and who give us the capacity to see, and perhaps who sing too – who can be heard in the songs of heroes and of heroic deeds, of gods and mortals.

Does the bard with his lute open a world in the same way as the temple? Or is the temple – the holy precinct of the temple – that place in which the bard may begin to sing, since it is because of that place that a people are gathered? There was not yet a word for poetry for the Greeks. The one who would be called a poet was yet a singer, and would remain so. The song was that living repetition of the past, that time-space (the interval in the day, the time  after the feast, before others in the great hall), that event in which, inspired, the singer would sing again the genealogy of that people who were gathered around him.

What would a history of song look like? And could that history tell us of the meaning of that destining so important to Heidegger? Of song as it opens a world? Of the ‘there is song’, the giving of song which is also a giving of the world? 

Will Oldham is not a bard who sings before others in the hall. If it is a world of which he sungs, it is one for which a people is missing. Will Oldham does not call us from the past, but from the future. It is of a future people that he sings and to the future he addresses itself. It is said his music is timeless, but this is not true. Rather that the whole past, the ‘all’ of song is allowed to sing of what is not past and what is not yet.

It is the songs on Days of the Wake that lend themselves to this lazy reading. All I am trying to do here is to find an idiom to write about music, and about what I want to call (but what does this mean?) the ‘there is music’. I admit it: this is a lazy transposition of what I have tried to write about reading to listening. I was interested, in the last book, about what I called the ‘there is’ of language. I suppose that referred to something like its materiality, its heaviness and the experience of that materiality to which literature is linked. Now I want to find a way to write of music in the same way.

Intimation that it will through looking at song that this will be possible. Song as it foregrounds words against music. As if a tension exists that would allow music to sing of itself ‘behind’ the words the singer sings. Behind them, but also in them, singing with them, sweeping up those words  in loving arms and bearing them there is music. Bearing them, those words, but also borne in those words, with them. The song is the rift that opens in the day. Along its edges, darkness burns. But one that can be seen, even as it withholds itself. Auditory metaphor – but it is difficult to find one – music allows what cannot be heard to be heard. Like the grinding of the celestial spheres of which Pythagoras spoke. Music presses to the ears a roaring without form. It permits that reduction where all of music looms such that it cannot be grasped. That great suspension which presses meaninglessness into the meaning of the words of the song.

None of this is right. I am trying to write, I suppose, about how sound is ordered and then disordered. About the assembling of sound as part of the opening of a world to a people and then the tearing apart of that assembling. One that occurs in a minor music sung from a minor place. One which accomplishes the opposite of what Heidegger calls the opening of the world. Acosmic music (music without a word, kosmos), music of the disaster (des-astres, without stars).

Watch the G8 concerts and you will see what were called in Rock School ‘rock positions’: a system of codes which would express the rock performance, codes which have long voided their content and now repeat themselves not even as farce (the spectacle of, say, Whitesnake in the early 80s) but as the worst kind of postmodern cynicism – every style is up for grabs; even U2 can play punk. Listen to Will Oldham, watch him speak or perform and at every stage there is a refusal of position. Not by chance will he write over and again of an unspecified ‘it’ – peculiar object, peculiar, impersonal agent which acts upon those of whom he sings. No consolation for him of the great cynicism. Reborn is a new a commitment – not for what was called rock and not even for punk (though punk is a different word to rock, is its refusal). Songs of part-objects and fragmentary things (always the word things in Will Oldham’s songs). Songs of couples in rooms. And passing through the words, flowing with them, sometimes, but also against them, forcing the singer’s voice to rise and break, there is a music which allows there to be sung something like the heart of being, the lining of the world.

These are beginning songs, but what begins are receptivities and new alliances, new relations. There are no stars above Will Oldham. Old verities have disappeared. Begin again; you can rely on nothing. The old forms have been hollowed out and the new a form of form must open. Not by chance does Will Oldham speak of the importance of Big Black and the Minutemen to him, and of the new collectivities which gathered around these groups. Punk repeated itself in them, as it did, later, in Slint and then in Will Oldham (his first album sees him accompanied by several members of Slint), which is only possible if the punk is repeated as a revolution, and not as a repetition of empty forms. When Will Oldham writes of God, this is not the God of monotheism. Not is a postmodern and cynical God, meaning everything and nothing. God now names a kind of relation: the one who asks for a wager. Will Oldham’s music is then exemplified by Abraham’s journey to the mountain in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. The knife is held over Isaac, which is to say, over himself as singer, over what he has taken himself to be (and what is taken as being). But God intervenes and a new Will Oldham is born.

Who is Will Oldham? Not the actor who hides himself under pseudonyms, but the one who knows that there are no names but false names, and each of us is the monster who cannot be named. A monster? Rather a horde of monsters, a whirling multitude. Who is Will Oldham? Interviewee who responds differently to the questions he is asked each time he is asked them again. Singer who begins anew with each album, working with new people, working differently each time. Who is he? One who watches over punk as it names the being of becoming.

Here is an account of some of the songs on Arise Therefore, credited to Palace Music, another of Will Oldham’s aliases.

Continue reading “Arise, Therefore”

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (an alias of Will Oldham)’s I See a Darkness, 1999. This song-by-song account is a work in progress which will keep growing.

Continue reading “I See a Darkness”

The Palace Brothers, Days in the Wake, from 1994. Also known as The Palace Brothers (Will Oldham explained the title came to him after the album was released.)

Continue reading “Days in the Wake”

Begin not with what you can do but with what you cannot do, and what you cannot do alone.

In several interviews Will Oldham writes movingly of friendship. He did not, he recalls, bring a big group of musicians together in order to record Ease on Down the Road; the album happened when friends came together. Likewise he does not engage in his collaborations in order to produce a particular piece of music, but to open himself to chance, to see what will happen. He prefers audiences who are not familiar with his work, and above all those who do not seek a personal relationship with him. Once again, this allows something unexpected to occur. It is the trajectory of the songs that are important for Will Oldham; they are linked to personae, to collaborations, to events.

W. O. describes his relationship with one of his heteronyms in terms of friendship:

There was [a period of] two or three months where I was playing in Sp’ain, and then I was playing with the Boxhead Ensemble in Eu’rope, and then I went to Aus’tralia. In that period of time, I had to figure out ev’rything that was negative about the approach, and then try to erase the burden aspect of ev’rything. And in order to that I need a friend, and that was who Bonny Billy was.

The suggestion here is that one needs to invent personas, and to distinguish between these personae and the person you are at a particular point. Somewhere, Will Oldham claims that Beck was spoilt by his earlier success, that, having achieved pop star status with ‘Loser’, he felt compelled to seek out new ways of recording in order to maintain the innovatory edge of ‘Beck’, the persona his success had created for him. ‘Beck’ becomes the straightjacket of a man who has to conform to a certain image; the changes in music style that one finds across his albums, Will Oldham suggests, will always fail to allow him to be anyone but this persona.

Here is Will Oldham explaining why he has changed alias so many times:

The main reason is because it seems like, at the v’ery least, each record, if not each song, has a trajectory of its own. It just seemed better to identify that, rather than think in terms of say, a group like the Rolling Stones, where it seems like the band is the trajectory and it’s easy to go from beginning to end.

Particularly interesting is the way Will Oldham contrasts himself to Smog’s Bill Callahan. Recalling the tour he shared with him, he writes:

With Bill there’s a satisfaction and a desire to be solitary at this moment, which is something that, you know, is not ideal – for me it opposes being alive and it’s a totally rebel-ish idea. I like using music to do things to be with people, to interact. On ev’ry level.

It seems Callahan is not open enough, that he is rebelling from a kind of social interaction Will Oldham thinks is necessary for life. He has fallen short of life by falling short of friendship.

But does Bill Callahan’s solitariness exhibit the movement of friendship in another sense? I remember a discussion I enjoyed a few months ago at a pub. We were drinking, a few of us, and one of us said that friendship was absolutely crucial and that it was our relationships to our friends that allowed us to think and write. I surprised myself by my vehemence in rejecting this claim, because it struck me that my essays, such as they are, were the product of years working alone in a room.

On reflection, I was reminded of Bataille’s retreat to the countryside after a number of years being passionately involved in the attempt to form various groups. In one book, he expresses regret about those attempts: ‘I become irritated when I think of the time of “activity” which I spent – during the last years of peacetime – in forcing myself to reach my fellow beings’. But the next sentence reads as follows: ‘I had to pay this price. Ecstasy itself is empty when envisaged as a private exercise, only mattering for a single individual’.

As Blanchot emphasises, the texts grouped under the general heading, The Atheological Summa, are not, as it might appear, a haphazard compendium of personal confessions, fragmentary poems, notes from unrealised projects and other disparate material. They achieve a unity by and through the movement that attests to the experience that disrupts the supposed unity of the narrating ‘I’. The events that Bataille relates do not constitute an autobiography, but interrupt the movement of auto-affection itself. As Blanchot comments, Bataille’s work is not just the story of certain extraordinary encounters, but is itself act of friendship. In Blanchot’s words, it is a ‘friendship for the unknown [one] without friends’ [amitié pour l’inconnu sans amis]’.

What does Will Oldham understand by the word friendship? Firstly, it refers to his relationship to those musicians with whom he collaborates, secondly, to his relationship for his audience, insofar as they are unknown, thirdly, for his relationship to his heteronyms, insofar as they allow him to lighten the burden, fourthly and this is speculative, for the trajectory of his songs, EPs and albums, which leads him to say at one point that he wishes CDs were grouped by title in the record shop rather than by the artist’s name and fifthly, and this is still more speculative, to a relationship to something unknown in ourselves and in the relationships between us. Here is what he says:

‘I know that ev’ryone, or I would imagine that most people, have some pretty unbalanced or fucked-up aspects’; ‘People feel that there is not a forum for communicating a lot of those things and they get the feeling that things are regular and then that things inside of themselves are irregular. Sometimes it’s suspicious. I have no idea of what’s regular and what’s irregular that goes on inside of myself, for example’.

Above all, the great albums of Smog, like the albums of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Palace Songs and Will Oldham, exhibit a friendship for the unknown. It was this friendship, I feel, that allowed me to write alone. Was I alone? I listened to The Doctor Came at Dawn over and over again. The vanishing point unto which it gave laid claim to me in the same way that I, in writing, was bound in friendship to the future.

What did I learn? Begin not with what you can do but with what you cannot do, and what you cannot do alone.

[1. This is a repost. 2. Typepad has mangled this post necessitating the use of inverted commas in the middle of words and the occasional abbreviation of Will Oldham’s name. Apologies.]

Whenever I think of Will Oldham’s music, I remember talking about it with my friends. We are enthusiastic, wistful, moved, we remember favourite interviews and profiles, we swap anecdotes about seeing him live, but in truth, we say very little.

What form of community, of being-together, claims those who are moved by the same work of art even as they exist far apart from one another and unaware of one another’s existence?

With some works of art, it is as if there was something predestined about the encounter, as if the work knew each of us in advance. We are each separately, singularly, brushed by its wings. But in what sense, then, can the encounter with the work be called a shared experience? Does the encounter withdraw into the absolute and the idiomatic to the extent that nothing can be said or shared of the experience of the work? Is it not, always, a question of the impossibility of the encounter, insofar as the work shatters the horizon of expectation, as it is absolutely new? If this is the case, then the community the work gathers is always disunited; it is born in disarray.

The commentator belongs to the community that is gathered and dispersed by the work. But he or she cannot be true to the encounter so long as the work refuses to gives itself in truth. The encounter is always a rupture or hiatus; the work that grips me is never close to me. Or rather, its presence is bound to an absence, because it never rests in its place. But before the work, I, too, give up my place. Who am I? On the way, on the road, caught between poverty and plenitude, like Plato’s eros. In the end, perhaps, I am no one at all; I meet the work by vacating my place.

Is this why I can only speak of my favourite works when I am drunk? I am not like the Socrates of Plato’s Symposium, master of eros, who can drink all night with Alcibiades and the others, but remains sober enough to out to the marketplace….

This is why the scene Bataille remembers is so important to me. Bataille and ‘X’ are not brought together in order to learn something from the book they read together or bound a shared project. My favourite conversations take place in the pub perhaps it is because it is there one can allow oneself to be remember the claim of the work. ‘That was inspired!’ the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues often exclaims. What he means is: you are drunk and you speak like a drunkard. But it is necessary, sometimes, to allow oneself to babble, to enthuse.

Plato distrusts a writing that would bear no personal guarantee – in particular, a certain sacred speech, in which the singer, inspired, is turned over to impersonal forces over which he can exert little control. Although Plato had great respect for Heraclitus, he puts the following words in the mouth of Theodorus concerning the pupils of this great Ephesian, perhaps indicating his own worry about a teacher who transmits his thought teaching in such enigmatic aphorisms:

one can no more have a rational conversation with those very Ephesians who claim to be the pundits than one can with lunatics […] people like that don’t become pupils of one another. They spring up automatically here, there and wherever inspiration strikes them; and they don’t recognise one another’s claims to knowledge. . .you’ll never get an explanation from them, even if they’re intending to give you one!

Now that is a perfect description of the babblers and enthusiasts who can explain nothing of the work, who are inspired, who cannot teach anyone anything at all. The more difficult task, the task of the commentator, is to get drunk on pure water which is to say, through that peculiar mixture of work and worklessness that will allow an essay to be written. The difficulty lies in preventing the essay itself from tumbling into that vanishing point, until there is nothing left of it at all.

This is, of course, also the difficulty faced by the work. Before the great works for which he is famous, Giacometti found his sculptures got smaller and smaller until he carried all his works in a matchbox. Perhaps there is something of the songs on the early albums Will Oldham recorded with others under the names of Palace, Palace Music and Palace Brothers that is similarly small or minor. And yet it is not that Will Oldham had yet to find his style. There is a fragility that is part of these works. His voice is frail not because it is weak or because he can’t sing, but because the guitars are tuned so that he can’t reach and hold the note.

It is Will Oldham’s great strength to endure this weakness, to sing and play at the edge of the murmuring vortex which threatens to enfold him, to allow his voice to be marked by a trembling or wavering at the edge of music. It is not the measurable frequency of sound that is at issue in his songs, but its nuances and timbres as they escape the possibility of a musical notation. It can never be a question of his musical competence, so long as competence is measured by the technical ability to reach and hold a note. But nor, finally, is Will Oldham a member of an avant-garde, who, after all, write and paint and create music only for one another.

It is always a question of working from a familiar space – the singer-songwriter, the country musician, the folk singer – and allowing that space to undergo a transmutation. This is what ‘independent’ or ‘alternative’ music has always meant: a minor practice at the edges of other genres, rooted in punk, which is to say, one of the last real avant-gardes, which brought art to everyone (similar claims can be made for the explosion of hip hop in the 1980s and, no doubt, other moments since).

I hope Will Oldham augurs the time of non-singers and non-painters, of writers without talent and artists without training. And I hope these untrained artists give birth to a new kind of commentator, who is drunk on pure water, no longer celebrating the human condition or the cultural prestige of the work.

Let us imagine (it will never happen) I was commissioned to write an essay on Will Oldham. I would have to avoid, straight away, any attempt to get hold of all his recordings. They must reach me: no – they must have already reached me. The accidents through which I found the songs must be part of my account of ‘Will Oldham’. He insists upon it – which is why he scatters his songs like the sower in Van Gogh’s great pictures. Disseminated are the song-seeds which cleave onto the hearer, growing as we grow, but never allowing us to possess them entirely. Will Oldham has said it on many occasions: he did not make his songs. We, the listeners make them. Or we own them as they own him – each of us possessed, dispossessed by what we hear.