Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy)

You toured with Bjork this past summer. How did that relationship start ? How did someone like Bjork hear a Will Oldham record ?

Bjork was friends with Harmony Korine, and we were going to play Iceland four years ago, and Harmony said “you should call Bjork.“ So we hooked up with her when we went to Reykjavik, and it was great, and we would e-mail every now and again, and kept up the communication, and when she went out on tour, she asked me to open.

Was that a good experience ? I mean, in Los Angeles you played the Hollywood Bowl. Was that a total shock ?

I try to make “total shock“ a sort of habit. So, in some ways in was, but that was a good thing. The Hollywood Bowl was the biggest audience I’d ever played in front of, and more than half of them were vocally discouraging, and that was awesome, you know ? That was so good.

But did you have doubts about going on that tour, since you’ve said you don’t want your music to be part of the mainstream ?

No, I figured there was no chance that anyone would give a shit about my set, so I just figured that I was gonna do these songs and most people would forget about ’em, since they paid sixty bucks to see Bjork and once she came on that’s all they cared about.

Stylus Magazine, 29 march 2004