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Features Disc of the day
Bill Callahan
Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle
(Drag City, 2009)
Still Bill: The man formally known as Smog enjoys career high.
After almost two decades as a celebrated miserablist and mournful heir to Mark Eitzel or Leonard Cohen's crowns, the Smog lifted from Bill Callahan's artist credit with 2007's Woke on a Whaleheart (his first LP under his own name), and from his heart too, the album suggested. Made during, and seemingly inspired by his relationship with harpist and adorable pixie Joanna Newsom, ...Whaleheart revealed a new, lighter Bill, igniting the flickers of empathy first spotted on the 2003's, Supper. His famously gloomy baritone seemed less brooding now, musing on what nature and love had to offer life. Bill himself seemed to physically blossom; he even smiled in photographs. And I am assured that he is now considered a bonefide Indie Hottie. This was the kind of love that transforms people. And with the end of that relationship fans of Bill's mortuary slab deadpan might expect him to return to the safe ground of alienated misanthropy. Because that's what men do when relationships end, isn't it? Grow beards, read hardboiled crime fiction and reassure themselves that it's not just them, life really is shit.
Well Bill has the first two down. His literary-chic beard bristling, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle opens with Jim Cain, a song that takes it's name from unflinching American crime writer James M Cain. "I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again," goes the plot. Yet his voice is so warm, the heartbeat drums womblike and reassuring, lulled by Bill's gentle guitar and swelling strings. For a dark place it certainly sounds beautiful. And so it continues. Eid Ma Clack Shaw is haunted by a dream of a departed lover so lucid "The hairs stood on my arm". Later the same night his subconscious throws up a perfect song, one with "all the answers/like hands laid on". He scribbles down the words and reads them back in the morning as (possibly) "Eid ma clack shaw/Ze boven del bah..." and a whole chorus of the most delightful gibberish. Who could not love indie's own Professor Stanley Unwin? While the arrangements are as lush and gorgeous as the imagery is dramatic: French horns, organ, cellos, and skies full of black and screaming leaves, twitching withers (equine metaphors a Callahan speciality) and, fabulously, a Rococo Zephyr, which he describes stepping over two lovers, as if it were a sort of giant bird, while a female soprano trills behind him. It's quite lovely.
Only in the final song, the near-ten minute orchestral mantra Faith/Void, does the hard headed, rational male return, as Bill considers life's secular truths, concluding gently but firmly that: "its time to put God away", as if he was talking to a toddler at bedtime. Clearly there is no seat for 'probably' on his bus.
Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle is like blossom in spring; its not like we didn't know that Callahan's dark, wintry twigs were capable of such vibrant colour, but it's still a surprise after a harsh winter. Time to stop and admire.
Jenny Bulley
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 21/04/2009
Further Listening
Bill Callahan - Woke On A Whale Heart (Drag City, 2007)
American Music Club - California (Demon, 1988)
Songs: Ohia - Magnolia Electric Co (Secretly Canadian, 2003)
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