Bill Callahan — the ‘miserabilist’ steps into the light

“Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” a deep, even voice announces at the start of Bill Callahan’s new album, Gold Record. It sounds like the Man in Black but is actually Callahan, impersonating Cash’s opening words from his At Folsom Prison live album. The same song ends with Callahan intoning the line, “Sincerely, L Cohen” — another provocative act of mimicry, this time quoting the conclusion of Leonard Cohen’s song “Famous Blue Raincoat”. Overweening, much?

“It’s a way to throw them back in the face of the people who have compared me to them over the years,” Callahan says, speaking on the telephone from his home city, Austin, Texas. Musicians hate being compared to other musicians, even ones as exalted as Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen. But Callahan adds: “Those guys are sort of like father figures to me — along with hundreds of other male and female songwriters. Joni Mitchell is constantly in my head when I’m writing songs. She’s huge. I just haven’t written her into a song yet.” He laughs.

Callahan, 54, merits his place in the tradition. For the first half of his recording career, he released albums under the name Smog. He acquired a reputation as a blackly humorous, literary singer-songwriter with an abrasive streak. He was called a “miserabilist”. That’s when the comparisons to Cohen started.

In 2007, he switched to making music under his own name. His songs became more rounded, although they retained a sardonic aspect. His last album, 2019's Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, was inspired by marriage and parenthood, but its title hinted at something sharper. After all, a shepherd in sheep's clothing might be said to have something of the wolf about him.

Usually a prolific and fast worker — he has released 21 albums since 1990, most of them recorded in less than a fortnight — he spent five years away from the studio before making Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest. During that time, he got married to Hanly Banks, a film-maker he met while making the documentary Apocalypse: A Bill Callahan Tour Film. They have a son who was born in 2015. Callahan thought about giving up music for parenting, but his wife dissuaded him. When he finally made it back to the studio for Shepherd, he “somehow” spent three months making it.

“That was a very different way of recording,” he says. “I started to feel like I was a square with a real job, like getting in the car every day and driving to the studio.” Following just a year later, Gold Record marks a return to his old style of work, recorded in just a week.

Gold Record is named after the sales award that an album receives in the US for selling 500,000 copies. A promotional poster for the record shows an unsmiling Callahan holding a champagne bottle and framed gold disc. It’s a fantasy: he’s no more likely to have that kind of commercial success than Ed Sheeran is to swap all his gold discs for cult acclaim and New Yorker profiles. But the album’s title also nods to Callahan’s rich seam of consistency as a singer-songwriter.

His debut album as Smog, 1990’s Sewn to the Sky, was dissonant and ramshackle, like Captain Beefheart with a home recording kit. The 1993 Smog album Julius Caesar was the first he made in a professional studio, overseen by a desultory engineer who spent his time chugging back cans of beer. But over time, having switched from Smog to his own name on 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart, he has found a calmer, clearer mode of writing and performing. Spartan guitar melodies open up hidden depths of feeling. Vocals are uttered in a steady baritone voice, as though dredging language for meaning. 

“If something is right, then it’s good,” he says of his songwriting. “Singing is kind of a lie detector for me. I can’t sing something that I don’t think is right. I can feel it in the edges around my lips.” 

A deadpan presence at the microphone, he allows himself a degree of expressiveness on Gold Record. “When I began I didn’t really think that much about pushing my voice in any way,” he says. “I was very focused on getting the words out and not trying to make them sound pretty. Just to let people figure out how the songs were supposed to hit them, without coaching them along too much. But as time went on, I started to think I wasn’t pushing myself enough to do different things.”

His new album is mainly grounded on unfinished songs, in some cases dating back years. They tell character-based stories. In “Pigeons”, a chauffeur dispenses homespun advice to a newly married young couple as he drives them to Mexico for their honeymoon (“When you are married/You are married to the whole world”). “The Mackenzies” is a touching, Raymond Carver-esque tale about a couple pretending that their dead adult son is still alive (“It’s okay/It’s okay/Son, son/We’re okay”). 

Although not intended as a thematically linked set of tracks, like Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, notions of parenting and nurture recur. “I think there is that great need in most people to be a parent to something,” he says. “It might be an animal, or a book you’re writing, or a garden, or it might be a person. We are all offspring of somebody. We’re always looking for fathers and mothers.”

His own childhood was complicated. Born in Maryland in 1966, he went as a boy to Yorkshire, in the north of England, to live on a US military base. Both parents worked for the National Security Agency, where his father did secretive language analysis work that he was forbidden to discuss.

Singing is kind of a lie detector for me. I can’t sing something that I don’t think is right. I can feel it in the edges around my lips

It wasn’t a happy experience. Callahan was taunted by his fellow schoolchildren in Yorkshire. “America then, in the mid ‘70s, was the coolest thing ever, like the TV shows and the music. Some of the British kids that I encountered felt jealous or threatened of America and Americans. Being in the UK and then coming back really accentuated America’s character for me.”

Gold Record’s “Protest Song” takes aim at an unnamed singer seen on television doing an inept agitpop song. “I protest his protest song!” Callahan sings: “I’d vote for Satan/If he said it was wrong.” The track dates back about a decade, but releasing it at a moment when Donald Trump’s presidency has provoked US popular culture into a ferment of political engagement smacks of contrarian timing.

“The problem with protest songs, for me, is that they are often too explicit and they have a time expiration date,” Callahan explains. His songs often deal with notions of American identity, but through a process of patient excavation and a deep engagement with landscape (rivers are a repeated image) rather than current affairs.

“I think it’s important to really look at things with openness and also to just know yourself,” he says, with a half-laugh. “There are so many shortcuts and lies we can tell about each other. Nobody’s that different from anybody, really.”

‘Gold Record’ is released on September 4 on Drag City

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