Life but a dream river for singer Callahan
Musical heavyweight learns to relax
In a cramped hotel foyer in Paris, I’m sitting with one of America’s most enigmatic singersongwriters. Bill Callahan has frequently been hailed as the Leonard Cohen of his generation, to date penning more than 15 albums’ worth of songs about love, death, nature, the comical hopelessness of human destiny, and, increasingly, his mystical belief in transcendent powers. In short, heavyweight stuff.
I first fell under the spell of Callahan’s music 20 years ago, but I dreaded meeting him. I imagined Pinteresque dialogue, with lots of agonizing silences filled by my own babble. To my relief, it doesn’t turn out that way, as the singer talks amenably, even chirpily, though always with painstaking care, about his gradual rise.
Given his obscure beginnings in the late 1980s, when he spewed out lo-fi cassettes from his bedroom in small-town Maryland, Callahan has scaled some mighty career heights.
Initially, he’d been inspired by the early-’80s hardcore punk scene in nearby Washington, D.C., and he named himself Smog, implying the existence of a real band, rather than a solo singer-songwriter.
“It was all just taking small steps,” he says. “The first ones I had to take alone, with no one observing any part of the process, until I had the confidence to go in a studio for Julius Caesar (his third album proper, from 1993).
“Then, for Red Apple Falls (1997), I had a sympathetic engineer for the first time (Jim O’Rourke, later of Sonic Youth). At that time, people thought I’d taken singing lessons. It was partly because you could hear my voice for the first time, but if you listen to those old records, my voice is really high. I was very tense in the studio. The big thing is to relax.”
Relaxation is one of his buzzwords nowadays. In the late ’90s, however, Callahan’s music was all about intensity, drummed up by his poleaxing authority as a storyteller, his mesmerizing baritone, and the exploratory sounds he corralled with an ever-changing backing band.
Callahan lived frugally, from album to tour to album again, without recourse to day jobs in between.
On the one hand, you sense this lifestyle afforded him an anonymity that suited his shy nature. On the other, there was an element of nurture, too: his parents worked for the National Security Agency, and moved the family to different posts. He concedes that there’s something of the spy about him, too.
On top of keen observation, dark comedy lit up songs like Dress Sexy at My Funeral, which revealed his debt to Lou Reed. “He was extremely important,” Callahan says, “and country people like Mickey Newbury, and Jerry Jeff Walker.” He pauses. “I feel like you come in under a cloak of someone else’s skin for a while, but then you can shrug it off — you have to find your own voice, if you want to keep doing it. That became a really conscious thing for me.”
His progress shifted up a gear when he settled in Austin, Texas, and, under his own name, released 2007’s Woke On a Whaleheart, whose unusually upbeat mood was attributed to his relationship with the oddball harpist Joanna Newsom. The affair ended, but the rays of light cast into Callahan’s hitherto gloomy world lingered on. The change in perspective was prompted, I’d heard, by his discovery of transcendental meditation.
“It’s about relaxation, because that’s when you can see things most clearly. Of course, that helps you with writing, and music — your brain can get on a high-speed train, and almost not be thinking, but you’re creating stuff.”
Last year’s Dream River is best described as “meditative.”
The borders between tracks seem to dissolve — very Zen — before we land back to earth at the end. Their author says he was trying to evoke our dream consciousness, which he believes is a linear narrative — a “dream river.”
“So the record’s always going forward,” he says. “There’s no recapping by going back to a chorus, and the music’s almost like this scenery passing by.”