Breathing Smog: Thoughts on Early Bill Callahan

This past weekend Julie and I saw Bill Callahan in Kingston, NY. It was my first time seeing him with a band since 2019 in Brooklyn, when he opened his set with “Trains Across the Sea” in tribute to David Berman. Callahan’s family was there at the recent gig, and his young son was manning the merch table. When he and the band took the stage and plugged in their gear, they were silhouetted in strobe lights while Lil Mama’s “Lip Gloss” pumped out of the P.A. I wondered if the thought crossed their mind: Are any of the songs we’re about to play this exciting? It was a funny and surprising gesture, and I also took it as a sign of confidence.

Their set was very good—heavy on the new album, as expected, and I always love watching Jim White play drums (I wrote about his playing a while back). I’ve been a fan of Callahan’s music for almost 30 years, and when you follow someone as prolific as he is for that long you can’t help but think about how he has changed, how you have changed, and how these changes line up. I reviewed My Days of 58 and I like it a lot—it’s probably my favorite of his albums since he returned with Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest in 2019 (I reviewed that and Reality for the WSJ, and Gold Record for Bandcamp). But my reaction when playing it for the first time, possibly owing to my own state of mind, surprised me: I found myself feeling a bit wistful for the bleakness and confusion of his earliest work.

For the first 14 years of Callahan’s career, which accounts for all his records as Smog save 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love—that’s 10 LPs and one essential singles-and-B-sides comp—he regularly wrote from the perspective of someone so alienated from the world that mere existence becomes painful. Some of this material seems as if it’s set in a Todd Solondz-like universe, where characters live so far outside the norms of society that every instinct is wrong, which only compounds their anger and isolation. If you’ve ever known some version of these feelings, hearing someone articulate them in harrowing detail while also throwing in some laughs is both comforting and intoxicating. You can’t help but feel a kinship.

It’d make no sense for Callahan to be making records from that vantage point now—the roots of those formative songs came from the mind of a teenage Smog, sewn to the sky, after all. His work has grown deeper and richer as he’s allowed more of life into it. And I want to be careful to differentiate the guy narrating these songs from who Callahan actually was as a person—I’d rather focus on the work, which is what it is regardless of where it comes from. But I still return to that early stuff regularly, because it gives me things no other music can. Songs such as…

“My Family” - Burning Kingdom EP (1994)

The EP is a companion to the album Julius Caesar from the year before, and like the earlier record, it makes brilliant use of cello. The strings on “My Family” are something out of a gothic nightmare, with a six-note seesaw figure repeating without variation as drums thud and cymbals explode in the distance. Singing from the perspective of a child, Callahan describes a scene of parental neglect unfolding inside a house that has become a prison. Mother is getting stoned behind a locked bathroom door. Father is watching porn in the study—“He gets to me,” the boy sings about the old man, “Planting footprints/Where I hope I’ll never be.” And sister, whom we might guess is the one person in the house the kid connects with, phones to say that she’s not coming home—ever. She says she’ll write, but the boy knows that’s a lie.

“Your Dress” - Forgotten Foundation (1992)
“Bathroom Floor” - Wild Love (1995)

In some early Smog songs, the narrator has a perspective we might now associate with the term “incel”—he sneers at women out of a contempt rooted in self-loathing, and he’s both fascinated and repelled by the trappings of femininity. In “Your Dress,” a minimalist one-chord tune from his second Smog album, Callahan remembers a woman in a purple dress, “The one you could afford because of the money/Your husband sent home from the war.” Ten years later, she’s in the same clothes, standing by the road “Like some forgotten foundation/For a never finished bridge.” He sings these lines like he’s either blaming the woman for something or celebrating the fact that she’s met a pathetic end, yet he himself sounds powerless and alone.

By the time of “Bathroom Floor,” the production on Smog records had improved considerably. The murky cello we heard on “My Family” is now crisp and bright, and it’s laid next to an instrument that has the ring of a harpsichord. The arrangement has the air of chamber music, which lends a dream-like feel to a story that’s the musical equivalent of flash fiction—it’s a horrifying/humiliating scene involving bloody rags and a broken string of pearls that whoever lives through it will be thinking about daily for the rest of their lives.

“Back in School” - Kicking a Couple Around EP (1996)

Sometimes a short phrase holds a mysterious story inside it. To hear that someone young is “back in school” is to wonder where they’ve been—maybe it was summertime, maybe they flunked out, maybe they got sick, maybe they ran out of money, maybe they just quit. To be “back in school” might mean you’re trying to get your life back on track, emerging from a perilous and uncertain place. This song from an EP that came out between Wild Love and The Doctor Came at Dawn opens with Callahan seeing a girl and a guy together—her hand in the guy’s hair, the guy’s hand in her back pocket—and all he can do is stare.

In an instant, his plan for connecting with her has fallen apart:

I wanted to tell you that I was back in school
But in the dark of the club, I knew it wouldn’t carry much weight

This song in particular seems to take place in a Solondz film. And it’s rendered so exquisitely, the moment-by-moment thought process of this crushingly lonely person with no idea how the world works, as seen in two lines that more or less serve as part of the chorus:

Well, I’m trying to learn your language
It’s like a fly learning how to bark

“Our Anniversary” - Supper (2003)

I’d divide the Smog years into four phases:

Ultra Lo-Fi

Sewn to the Sky
Forgotten Foundation

On these records, it’s Callahan recording at home alone—he plays most everything, songs tend to have one musical and one lyrical idea and that’s it.

Sonic and Thematic Growth

Julius Caesar
Wild Love
The Doctor Came at Dawn

During this period, Callahan writes with a rare sense of freedom—he’s learning how songs work and channeling his typically dark (and frequently funny) point of view into settings that are more musically sophisticated. He writes about childhood dreams, fractured adult relationships, puzzling things he’s witnessed and horrifying things he imagines. These are songs that feel like they could go anywhere, from a winter-rate seaside motel to Prince’s studio.

First Peak

Red Apple Falls
Knock Knock

On these records, both produced by Jim O’Rourke, everything locks into place—the melodies are sticky, the arrangements are creative and support the songs, and the sharp edges of his storytelling are further honed.

Transition

Dongs of Sevotion
Rain on Lens
Supper

These strong records sound like they’re coming from a guy in search of something new. My favorite is Supper, which should have been the final record as Smog, though Drag City convinced him to keep the moniker for one more album (in pretty much every way, A River Ain’t Too Much to Love sounds like the start of the Bill Callahan era, with a more mature and present perspective that allows him to explore subjects with a greater degree of nuance).

“Our Anniversary” is one of many favorites on Supper because you can hear Callahan’s narrator fighting his worst impulses and giving in to them partway, perhaps pointing him toward a wiser future. We hear the pretty countrified groove, and the opening imagery sets a scene for the kind of thoughtful, mature love song he’d write later, where love is an extension of the beauty of the natural world:

It’s our anniversary and the bullfrogs
And everything that can sing is singing
Its mating song

He then spies his car sitting in the driveway, and fantasizes about driving away in it. Problem is, his partner has hidden the keys, knowing he’d split if given the chance, which would ruin their special day. He imagines hotwiring it, and then retaliates, turning on the headlights so when she wakes up the next morning to go to work the battery will be dead. Sounds pretty bad. They have messy, drunken sex and then he starts to think about next year, holding out hope that something this damaged can turn into something bearable:

Let us thrive, let us thrive
Just like the weeds we curse sometimes

“Our Anniversary” sounds so sweet, but it’s a fucked-up story about a fucked-up relationship that somehow leaves you with just the tiniest sliver of hope. I think of it as a version of what Paul Thomas Anderson, around the time of Magnolia, called “The saddest possible happy ending.” Changes were coming.