BILL CALLAHAN – MY DAYS OF 58: REVIEW

Mar 10
4 min read

BILL CALLAHAN

My Days Of 58 (Drag City)

HAPPY BILL CALLAHAN, wise Bill Callahan, is a comfortable presence now, some years and several albums into what you might call a transformation, though it probably is better described as an expansion, a broadening of what might matter and who he could be, for himself and for others. It took a while to get used to, and some people never really did, finding comfortable the antithesis of interesting, but really it just felt good, even when in Reality, four years ago, the spectre of corruption of the communal spirit was sighted.

None of the earlier versions of him – a sceptical traveller in clipped worlds of muted optimism; an amused observer of the depths into which even the most shallow might fall; a man standing on the line between disturbing and discerning; the one reconciling nature with what he thought he knew; someone alone, always alone, even with others – had been lost completely because he had become a father or a husband. But in context now, that was obviously a shade, a sliver, of what was available.

That’s especially true if you approach him after digesting this new album, whose cover incidentally and I don’t think accidentally, bears a striking resemblance to Frank Sinatra’s similarly themed September Of My Years.

True, the man who has found love given and love received foundational in living is here. The man whose pleasure in the minutiae of domesticity is out and proud and whose low rambling voice can come with a light self-mocking tone or a simple isn’t-this-something-to-behold sheen, is back. But he is back with qualifications (and many French horns, the signature sound for me of this record).

These qualifications might, if we are being incredibly reductive, be summarised as mortality, creativity and history. Not new for him but seen at different angles, including that tricky terrain of being a father not making the same mistakes his did, but making some nonetheless, and a son whose very imperfect relationship with his own father now draws on empathy and a touch more sympathy.

Why do men sing?, he asks in the first song, a long, building quiet powerhouse of a scene-setter. The reasons are many, the answers possibly endless – or at least one hour, the length of this 12-song set – but among them you will find, as he explains later on, how “As time wore on, I found myself increasingly turning to my guitar, instead of other people/In times of loneliness, and sorrow and confusion”. Which sounds romantic, but really it’s “The exact opposite reason of why God invented it in the first place”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H9oJnTiCHA

In language that has continued to grow plainer this decade, Callahan sings of why he started writing songs and how it mattered once he stopped worrying if the girls were noticing (“I don’t want to say that it saved my life, but it gave me a life”) and looks at what it means to do that same “job” in his late 50s when it’s meant exclusion for so much of the time (“I’ve been living too long in my head”). He wants but he knows the cost; he sacrifices some of what once never required a second thought, but he knows the reward. And he can make a joke about Lou Reed, or the idea of Lou Reed anyway.

Callahan puts that within a contemporary moment when the simple act of writing seems oh so quaint to oh so many (“I’m not a robot, and I never will be/Sing with me, sing it, sing it”) and making anything feels like an effort of no use to anyone with any sense, and no attachment to sentiment. But for him it is anything but a throwaway to be what he is, this broader and, yes, deeper man (“Now my biggest fear is not the dying/My biggest fear is I’ll stop trying”).

What feels particularly different on My Days Of 58, an album that still has the charming trot of Highway Born, whistling and all, and the spry, woodwind earthiness of Lake Winnebago, is that once again there’s often an unnerving dissonance, emotional more than musical, and a tension, musically slightly more than vocally. Comfort is not eschewed, joy is not avoided – did I mention those French horns? Yes, Bacharach or Charles Dumont style – but they are not ever constants nor simply found.

The fragility of the world is represented, counter-intuitively, in the solidity of the music and the closeness of the voice; the certainties in turn are in the niggling scratchy guitar line in Lonely City or the slip rhythm of Pathol O.G.. More than a reminder of the sneaking disquiet that wormed its way through Smog records and the pre-family Callahan solo albums, this unease is an explanation for why the moments of happiness in his life, and consequently in his songs, matter. Or are noted, celebrated and measured against all other things.

The year being 58 wasn’t anything like a bad year for Callahan, but it was – hell, is, and will be for 59, 60, 61 … – something more complex, maybe in its own way more satisfying, than “good”. As is My Days Of 58.