17 Facts About Will Oldham

Will Oldham's mother, Joanne Lei Will Tafel Oldham, was a teacher and artist.

Will Oldham's father, Joseph Collins Oldham, was an attorney and photographer.

Will Oldham attended Brown University sporadically while pursuing a career as an actor, and living between Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Bloomington, Indiana.

Will Oldham began making music during this time, initially as a project for his professor Jeff Todd Titon, an ethnomusicologist at Brown University.

Will Oldham is known for his "do-it-yourself punk aesthetic and blunt honesty", and his music has been likened to Americana, folk, roots, country, punk, and indie rock.

Will Oldham first performed and recorded under various permutations of the Palace name, including Palace Brothers, Palace Songs, Palace Music, and simply Palace.

Will Oldham stated in a 1995 interview with KCRW that the name Palace Flophouse was inspired by reading John Steinbeck's Cannery Row.

Some of his albums, such as There Is No-One What Will Oldham Take Care of You, Viva Last Blues, and I See a Darkness, have appeared on greatest albums lists.

Will Oldham played the role of Chip McClure in Everybody's Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure, and the role of Miles in the film Thousand Pieces of Gold.

In 2004, Will Oldham appeared as himself in the short documentary film Tripping With Caveh, wherein he took psilocybin mushrooms with autobiographical filmmaker Caveh Zahedi.

The project was never picked up by a television network, but the short with Will Oldham finally saw official release in the 2015 retrospective box set Digging My Own Grave: The Films of Caveh Zahedi.

Will Oldham played a lead role as Kurt in Kelly Reichardt's film Old Joy, and had a brief role in the director's next film Wendy and Lucy.

Will Oldham played Pastor Pigmeat in the "Horse Apples" episode of the second season of the MTV children's show parody Wonder Showzen and appeared in an episode of Chatman and Lee's subsequent television show, Xavier: Renegade Angel as a Reverend.

Also in 2010, Will Oldham appeared in Jackass 3D as a gorilla trainer.

In 2011, Will Oldham played a father telling a bedtime story to his son in David Lowery's short film Pioneer.

In 2009, Will Oldham narrated Madam and Little Boy, a documentary film about atomic weapons, directed by Swedish artist Magnus Bartas.

In 2010, Will Oldham narrated Music Makes a City, a documentary about the formation of the Louisville Orchestra, directed by Owsley Brown III and Jerome Hiler.