Around the release of his last studio album, "Beware", Will Oldham embarked on a small project. According to the writer Kelefa Sanneh, in a New Yorker profile published in January 2009, Oldham intended, “To promote the album with singles, a photo shoot, and a handful of interviews, if only to prove that record promotion doesn’t really work, at least not for him.”
I’m sure most of you have heard the grim news about Mark Linkous in the past few days. I can’t really add much to the memorials that have accumulated about him and his music; on the odd occasion when I met him – all well over a decade ago now – he always came across as a gentle and reserved man, who told harrowing personal stories but at the same time didn’t seem to give that much away about what he was actually like. I have, though, dug out this Sparklehorse piece I wrote for NME in 1996. As is so often the way of these things, it’s hard not to see an awful poignancy in his last couple of quotes.
