So yeah, singing as a way of expressing or escaping or expelling unbearable events: if you have a thinking brain, which some of us are cursed with, you have to have something, and it could be singing and it could be alcohol, but it's progressive rather than regressive - you don't get better by drinking.

The idea of ending each day in song implies a kind of ritual too.

Yeah, a ritual and a connection, 'cause even if you sing by yourself you are using things that have been given to you. The idea of singing is that it's communication from the past into the present and right on through to the future.

Will Oldham, interviewed, in Will Oldham on Bonnie 'Prince' Billy