A personal and musically quirky set of musical and lyrical explorations fashioned out of chaos and structure.
For his first studio album in four years, Bill Callahan has returned with an experimental yet structured collection of songs recorded with the players who toured his previous release Ytilaer: guitarist Matt Kinsey, saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, and drummer Jim White.
Knowledge of process is not always necessary to consumption of a (as media students would call it) text, but in this instance, it is perhaps helpful in understanding the musical outcomes and intentions, although, again, returning to media studies’ reception theory, the creator has no control over how the final product is interpreted or received by the listener/consumer. So, to put it more simply, it’s worth knowing how Callahan created this to understand why it sounds like it does and how we might wish to take it on board.
Each song was prepared with each player separately. The basic tracking was done with drummer Jim White, Callahan rehearsed with Kinsey on guitar and also gave Laurenzi instructions to write horn parts. The result of working on the songs in isolation thereby creates a level of dissonance between the parts; instead of directly playing off each other, each performer is playing within a structure, but brings it together, and there’ll be all sorts of unsuspected musical fusions and clashes. Not content with that, Callahan also brought in other players to the recording to add in further levels of ad hoc musical texture on top of the created base and perhaps to add more musical glue to the base.
The intention was to create, in Callahan’s words, a “living room record”, one of relaxed, structured and improvisational playing, and that’s indeed what the listener gets.
Why do men sing opens the record with the kind of atmospheric up and down-tuned guitars that are reminiscent of those on Courtney Marie Andrews’ Valentine and horn arrangements that echo The Delines – Callahan’s delivery is pitched somewhere between Jarvis Cocker on downers and the aforementioned Delines’ Amy Boone. Despite the experimental nature of the record, there’s a strong chorus, and it’s a good choice to lure the listener in.
Callahan’s deep brogue ventures into spoken-sung Lou Reed areas on The Man I’m Supposed To Be, with a core melody juxtaposed against staccato instrumentation, there’s almost ska-like guitar glued with noodled saxophone. Pathol O.G. opens with a confessional explanation of why Callahan has been doing what he does, over an extended single-chord intro which bursts into sunnier moments of melodic musing about Jacob’s ladder and the purpose and direction of a creative life.
Stepping out for air offers a languid musical pause for reflection where you have to “learn to see beauty in the grey” amid pad-like rushes of saxophone and brushed cymbals, whereas Lonely City offers a more conventional take on the emotional toll of touring and travel, with spikes of jangly picked guitar. Empathy starts in a very stripped-back manner, with just vocal and acoustic guitar, and is another set of personal this-point-in-time observations and recollections. It’s a touching evaluative tribute to his kids and comparison of his offspring with his good self – it would make a fabulous indie movie soundtrack contribution, given the right script.
West Texas is a sparse, desert-inspired soundscape, not quite Calexico in musical scale, but there’s a grappling with the remoteness and scale of place and its effect on the individual. Computer is much more internally-focused – and in its first few lines sums up the personal effect of the “village guillotine” beautifully. The question “are you human” and the statement “I’m not a robot and never will be” is a call for humanity, spirit and flawed beauty and if anything, a mission statement for this release. ‘Lake Winnebago’ moves away into the great wide open and, in an acute way, is a very distant cousin of, would you believe, Wordsworth’s Prelude, in its exploration of the effects of nature and humanity’s furniture which populates it. Highway Born is a less conventional ode to the road, with internal rhyme and musical truck-horn figures that are actually quite funny, and great whistling, too.
And Dream Land has a disconcertingly shifting tempo and wigs out into psychedelic freakery of a Tom Verlaine nature, replicating sonically the strange dreams that are all over the place; this is a bit like that. The album concludes with The World is Still: appropriately percussion-free and interspersed with nocturnal and wee small hours musical phrases, it’s a quiet way to sink in and out of things, a palate cleansing and stark conclusion.
The tags on the artist’s Bandcamp page reference “alternative experimental folk Austin”, and that’s probably as close as you’ll get in a few words in trying to define Bill Callahan’s My Days of 58, a personal, musically quirky set of musical and lyrical explorations cleverly fashioned out of the chaos and structure of their creator’s wide-ranging mind.
