Bill Callahan
Dream river pilot. By Andrew Male.
“Editing is writing,” Bill Callahan told me in 2012. “Anyone can write a bunch of words. It’s the taking away that’s writing.” That taking away process began in 1990, when this Maryland-born former hardcore kid recorded Sewn To The Sky, an abrasive collection of lo-fi noir interiors, hard-boiled imagery pulled from the hard-boiled pages of Black Mask magazine, and informed by an often unhappy, peripatetic and sheltered childhood, with two parents who both worked for the National Security Agency. This ability to observe unseen, an NSA job requirement, was something Callahan also inherited, and it would inform the exceptional run of records he would release over the next 15 years under the veiled alias of Smog. Pared-down, spacious ballads of icy clarity, delivered in cold-blooded baritone, the best of Smog played like late-night Jim Thompson monologues, caught somewhere between downfall and insight. With the years, that outsider figure within Callahan’s songs changed shape, moving from the city, to the suburbs, to the country, finding a new strange wisdom in nature along the way. In the process, the urban shroud was dropped, so that Smog became (Smog), which then became plain old Bill Callahan. The records Callahan has recorded under his own name since the patchy Woke On A Whaleheart in 2007, have been wry, slow-drifting affairs, minimalist dream-haze narratives about landscape and America, imbued with a melancholy sense of quiet wisdom. However, one thing missing in all this is a glimpse of the artist at work. Callahan’s B-sides, stray tracks and his remarkable way with a cover version reveal a master songwriter in search of new directions. Someone should definitively compile these off-map wanderings soon.