No Depression .... Bill Callahan’s steady-handed American songs.
by Sasha Frere-Jones
http://www.newyorker.com
April 18, 2011
In 1996, the songwriter and singer Bill Callahan was preparing to play a show in London. The comedian Sean Hughes was scheduled to introduce him, and suggested that he might say, “Miserable bastards of the world—welcome our leader.” Callahan, who was performing under his original stage name, Smog, politely asked him to try something else.
Listen superficially to “Apocalypse,” his thirteenth studio album (the third under his own name), and you might think, like Hughes, that Callahan is a bit down in the dumps. His singing is a steady baritone recital that drifts in and out of melody like someone wandering through a gas station looking for Tic Tacs: he seems focussed yet unhurried. Pay attention to Callahan’s lyrics, though, and you see why he wouldn’t want to be called a miserable bastard—he isn’t, at least in song. His delivery is even, and sometimes flat, but this seems to be a strategy to make you concentrate on the words. In Callahan’s world, affect and inflection constitute cheating. But this does not necessarily have anything to do with darkness, whether he is singing about funerals, weddings, or parenthood.
In fact, anybody hearing the Smog album “Wild Love,” from 1995, would think Callahan droll. The backing track for “Prince Alone in the Studio” sounds like a karaoke version of a Joy Division song, turgid and cheap, driven by bad synthesizers and distant drums. The bathos is all mockery, however, and the more epic the track becomes the better the jokes get.
Callahan describes the girls who wore “their special underwear” in the hope of sleeping with Prince. But the Master gets lost in recording while wearing “raspberry headphones.” The Master keeps working:
“It’s three A.M. / Prince hasn’t eaten in eighteen hours / dinner’s burned on the stove / But Prince, he doesn’t even know.”
Callahan shoots down the mythical aura of the genius—Prince—but also that of himself.
I found this candor immediately disarming, especially at a moment when many of his peers were going for as much obfuscation, noise, and dirt as possible. Callahan started in a similarly shrouded place, in 1990, with a self-released album called “Sewn to the Sky.” Describing his songs from the early nineties as “powdery,” he said that he didn’t expect to be able to reproduce most of them live. By 1995, though, he had begun to write albums instead of songs, and he still talks of an album’s first and second sides, even though many of his younger listeners have never seen a two-sided storage medium. He works out all the lyrics on paper first. Then he writes the music. When he is done, he must be able to play each song by himself.
Over time, Callahan, who is forty-four, started to resemble a particular kind of seventies folk-and-country artist: a songwriter like Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson, who engaged in both pop and politics, and who helped create the notion of a steady-handed American song that was rooted in verse and chorus but was open to all sorts of subject matter. Callahan’s voice has become a gorgeous thing, the product of a resonant chest and even breathing, underlining strange and subtle lyrics—few singers of his cohort put their voices as high in the mix or enunciate so clearly. “I Feel Like the Mother of the World,” from “A River Ain’t Too Much to Love,” which came out in 2005, begins in a vaguely philosophical register:
“Whether or not there is any type of God / I’m not supposed to say / and today / I don’t really care / God is a word / and the argument ends there / oh, do I feel like the mother of the world / with two children fighting.”
The music is a fluid, humming combination of acoustic guitars, drums, and the slightly frayed chime of the hammer dulcimer. Callahan switches quickly into a casual mode for the second verse, and describes fighting with his sister. It’s beautiful, brief, and weird. Are nations just scrappy kids? Are we always children?
There are other antecedents for Callahan, some of which he rejects. Though he has expressed admiration for Fred Neil, the deep-voiced folkie known for writing “Everybody’s Talkin’,” from “Midnight Cowboy,” and for Merle Haggard, another songwriter who is fond of the comic deadpan, Bob Dylan, the albatross for many songwriters, is irrelevant to Callahan. “I never liked him,” he told me. “He seems sort of unpleasant and uncomfortable.”
Last year, Callahan was covered by a different kind of elder, the poet and singer Gil Scott-Heron, who named his first studio album in many years, “I’m New Here,” for a song that he borrowed from “A River Ain’t Too Much to Love.” Callahan’s original is all guitar and voice, a light two-step that Callahan fingerpicks.
“No, no, no, no / I did not become someone different / I did not want to be / but I’m new here / will you show me around? / No matter how far wrong you’ve gone / you can always turn round / Met a woman in a bar / I told her I was hard to get to know / and near impossible to forget.”
That’s as close as Callahan gets to an honest confessional, though he’s creating a character as much as anything else: he’s chopping up and collating dozens of country songs and seventies Hollywood movies like “Five Easy Pieces,” in which male leads are heroes and anti-heroes at once, beloved by all, no matter how much they hate themselves.
“Apocalypse” is my favorite of Callahan’s albums, not because it has better songs—those are scattered among at least five others—but because it does exactly what he wants it to do: it conveys an album’s coherence. The music is based on the most basic acoustic-guitar strumming, after several records where he fingerpicked songs.
“That way of playing puts your voice right in the middle, instead of on top, which is what happens anytime you strum,” he told me. “America!,” the third song, is possibly Callahan’s goofiest. It may have taken ages to perfect, but it sounds like something you would make up while watching TV and holding a guitar—which is what Callahan does in the song. The music is just two chords, plus a few mock-country licks, and a mild oompah rhythm. He watches David Letterman while in Australia, gets homesick, and starts to list his favorite country singers, using their actual military roles:
“Captain Kristofferson! Buck sergeant Newbury! Leatherneck Jones. Sergeant Cash. / What an army / what an air force / what a Marines / America!”
He calls out, quietly, “Afghanistan! Vietnam! Iran! Native America! America!” Then he drops this homily: “Well everyone’s allowed a past they don’t care to mention.”
When I asked Callahan if he felt he had ever “killed it” with a song, he smiled tightly. I immediately regretted the question, and wondered how real cowboys would talk about music. He paused, and then said, “I think I killed it on ‘Drover,’ ” naming the album’s first song, which is bleak and complex, like a Cormac McCarthy novel. “Drover” is centered on a strummed acoustic-guitar figure flanked by violin accents and silvery bits of distorted guitar. The narrator is a cattle drover. He sings,
“I drove them by the crops and thought the crops were lost / I consoled myself with rudimentary thoughts / And I set my watch against the city clock / It was way off!”
Even when Callahan becomes an actual cowboy, he throws in a punch line. His version of stoicism is not so different from Clint Eastwood’s. He continues into what serves as a sort of chorus, singing,
“One thing about this wild, wild country / It takes a strong, strong it breaks a strong, strong mind / And anything less, anything less makes me feel like I’m wasting my time.”
Callahan, it turns out, is spare with words because they are the same as time.
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