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April 10, 2011

Bill Callahan – Apocalypse

Bill Callahan’s new album came out on April 5th. It’s good.

(Click on the image to buy or listen to tracks)

‘Bill Callahan’s fourteenth album Apocalypse is the best he’s sounded in a while, though even the worst Smog or Bill Callahan album the album is still better than most people’s best. Apocalypse clocks in at seven songs, and just over forty minutes. With one strange and obvious misstep, the mystical and ridiculous Free’s, the rest of the album is driven and resounding. The stripped-down songs drift one into the other until you’ve reached the end, and while there’s little except the song ‘America’ or  ‘Riding for the Feeling’ that stands as singularly strong or memorable as songs on his other albums, the overall impression is a good one.’

Here’s a long thing I wrote for the Hairpin about him and women that they ended up not being able to use after all.  So you get it.

by Amanda Mae Meyncke

The difficulties of writing about music are the same as writing about film.  There is so much that can be best communicated through a look or a sound, something beyond words.   The difficulty of writing about something you care about is even more complicated, and I really like Bill Callahan.  I remember when I first figured out that Callahan was dating Joanna Newsom.  He used to go by the moniker Smog, but when he met Newsom he started recording under his own name.  So much more of their music made sense, in that weird way like when you first heard that the Alanis Morissette song “You Oughta Know” was about the guy who played Uncle Joey on Full House.  Uncle Joey! Can you even?

I saw Callahan a few times in the past few years, once at the Troubadour in Los Angeles where women hollered and gyrated against the stage as if he were some kind of overgrown Justin Bieber, all the while Callahan with his salt and pepper grey hair, his standard issue white Oxford collar shirt and blue Wrangler jeans looked decidedly amused and refused to make eye-contact with anyone.  Callahan enjoys a life of privacy that comes from only being famous among a very small set of people.  Seriously the guy has put out like fourteen records and barely anyone knows who he is. About every three years, there’s a new one, like clockwork.

In this albums, there are a few documented relationships, some with women that would go on to be more famous than he was, and some just craziness.  None of this is secret, especially since the women themselves have spoken so freely of their relationships. His interviewer in The Fader in 2007 mentions that he has a reputation as “a sad sack and somewhat of a bastard.” Which, I mean, seems about right. Callahan’s inability to make relationships work is self-documented to a fault, songs such as Strayed, Truth Serum or Our Anniversary make it painfully clear that Callahan has trouble staying put.  I got more and more convinced that if I could figure out which women went with which albums, it would explain so much more about Smog, Bill Callahan and all of it.

Rollerderby writer and wild-child Lisa Carver in the very early 90′s, may be the first documented Smog girlfriend, she speaks to their relationship in her crazy book Drugs Are Nice, saying such encouraging things as: “With Bill, there’s this enormous sludge-pool of despair bubbling under a veneer of humor both in him and in his music.” Wow. And talking about how he used to make her taste any coffee she poured out for him because she might have poisoned it? And she thought that was sweet?  Anyway in a 2005 interview with 3AM Magazine she said; “I admire him too, but from a distance. He wouldn’t speak to me for years.”  Hahaha. Awesome.

Next came Cynthia Dall, who appears to have been a much less crazy friend of Lisa Carver, and a musician in her own right, she toured with Callahan in the mid-nineties and appears on several Smog recordings including Wild Love and The Doctor Came at Dawn, and he plays guitar and sings on her lo-fi Drag City released Untitled album from 1996.  She refers to him as Billy Callahan in the liner notes, which struck me as one of those weird public displays of intimacy where someone tries to clearly lay claim to someone else.

Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power was his girlfriend in the late nineties, about two or so years before she would release Moon Pix and he would release the seminal Knock Knock, both albums seem to deal extensively with the relationship. He released Red Apple Falls while they were together. They lived together for a time on the east coast, and things seem to have ended amicably between the two, though Chan Marshall’s rampant alcoholism at the time can’t have helped much. She wistfully speaks to their relationship in a Harp Magazine interview, claiming that Callahan was her first love, and called him “a great, wonderful person.”  She included a cover of Smog’s ‘Bathysphere’ on What Would The Community Think and one of ‘Red Apples’ on her The Covers Record. Seems like all is well there.

In perhaps his best known relationship, Callahan dated Drag City label-mate Joanna Newsom for about three or four years, she appeared on his 2005 album, A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, playing the piano and warbling along here and there, and with his follow up, 2007′s Woke on a Whaleheart, we saw an entire album of exuberance and joy. (As she appeared on his album, in turn, Callahan appears on her magnum opus Ys. The only voice on the album besides Newsom’s, Callahan’s voice comes rolling in near the end of the 16 minute song ‘Only Skin’ in perhaps what is the grandest moment in an album filled with grandeur.) Woke on a Whaleheart was Callahan’s 12^th album but first album under his own name, and in an interview in The Fader from 2007, there is obviously a great deal of love between the two as he speaks fondly of Joanna Newsom and she speaks glowingly of him in other interviews from the same time.

Apparently he’s now dating another Drag City lady, Sophia Knapp from the band Lights.  A woman who I could have sworn proudly touted at one point on her ‘About Me’ page that she attended clown-college, but can find no evidence of it on the Wayback Machine.  She tours with him, and will be playing in support of the new album.

This all adds up to a lot of musical legacy that follows him still, bits of guitar and voice on other women’s records, their contributions on his albums.  I wonder at that.  As a musician you write about the women or men you have loved, and it becomes part of your work.  You play those songs over and over when touring, do you think about how your girlfriend isn’t singing backup anymore? Or how you used to dedicate this one to a different girlfriend when you played it live?  Remember how J.Lo hates her music video with Ben Affleck in it?  Does Bob Dylan look at all of his records and think about the endless relationships represented by the innumerable love songs? Is it the same with filmmakers, say does Darren Aronofsky wish he hadn’t used ex-wife Rachel Weisz in The Fountain? You must just stop thinking about it after a while as new loves fill in for the old.

—

Bill Callahan’s fourteenth album Apocalypse is the best he’s sounded in a while, though even the worst Smog or Bill Callahan album the album is still better than most people’s best. Apocalypse clocks in at seven songs, and just over forty minutes. With one strange and obvious misstep, the mystical and ridiculous Free’s, the rest of the album is driven and resounding. The stripped-down songs drift one into the other until you’ve reached the end, and while there’s little except the song ‘America’ or  ‘Riding for the Feeling’ that stands as singularly strong or memorable as songs on his other albums, the overall impression is a good one. The electric guitar and the freedom that Woke on a Whaleheart possessed is present here, but more controlled, and contained.  Whaleheart felt like there wasn’t enough room in the world to hold in all the joy, and the follow-up, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, couldn’t have sounded more oppositional and a return to the old ways.  Lyrics like “I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again” made it clear that somebody got their heart broke.

There is some terrifying imagery continuing here that began to formulate with that first post-Newsom breakup release: Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle.  Through the muddle of depression and sadness seemed to be some kind of self-blame and the ideas seemed to make a lot more sense when taken with Newsom’s last release, the massive Have One On Me. Upon closer listening, several of her songs seemed to document a miscarriage or abortion.  Songs such as Newsom’s Baby Birch (“This is a song for Baby Birch, I will never know you.” And  “Be at peace, baby, and begone.“) made it terrifyingly clear that something traumatic had occurred, and on Apocalypse, a song like Baby’s Breath seems to carry this out to its logical conclusion. (“It was agreed, it was agreed, it was me tearing out the baby’s breath “ and “She was not a weed, she was a flower.”)  Yeah, musicians often sing in character, and no, not every little word means some big huge thing, but once a friend pointed this out, it seemed painfully obvious.

When you put an album out, you invite the listener to think about what it is that you’ve made.  When you’ve put out fourteen or fifteen albums over a span of decades, you’ve steadily drawn a line straight through your past, dragging other people along with you for all time.

(Thanks to the inimitable and endlessly knowledgeable Eagle Flies With The Dove for assistance with this one.)

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