You could say this is Bill Callahan’s debut album, even though he’s sired a dozen albums under the name of SMOG. Well, he
has laid that name to rest and, well, here we are with another debut album from him. With the same maverick spirit of, say, a Nilsson or a Cat Stevens, Callahan has made an album that is born of no school of music other than what is in his heart and soul. Boasting the propulsive, glittering and classically pretty arrangements of Neil Michael Hagerty, this album manages to bypass the trends of the modern day while shunning retro entrapments. With a mix of gospel backing vocals by Deani Pugh-Flemmings of the Olivet Baptist Church, the incendiary guitar work of Pete Denton, and the honeyed violins of Elizabeth Warren, the music on this album touches on gospel, tough pop and American Light Opera.
April 14 street date. "Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle" surveys a landscape that grows organically, like the time two people spend together or the time one person spends alone (with another). One way or another, it's awfully pretty. Something's clearly making Bill feel like a natural man. And high in the saddle, with a pouch of Big League Chew and nine sweet new tunes in tow, he's riding herd over a diverse bunch of sounds by top-notch players. Sure, there's guitar, keyboards and drums, just like there's always been, but arranger Brian Beattie brought some old friends back into the picture: violins and French horns. Plus, recording in the big state of Texas has given Bill a panoramic sound- screen, filled with verdant and sparkling sounds, all of which allow him access to the depths of expression, allowing a gentle and stirring view of that which we call "soul".
April 14 street date. "Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle" surveys a landscape that grows organically, like the time two people spend together or the time one person spends alone (with another). One way or another, it's awfully pretty. Something's clearly making Bill feel like a natural man. And high in the saddle, with a pouch of Big League Chew and nine sweet new tunes in tow, he's riding herd over a diverse bunch of sounds by top-notch players. Sure, there's guitar, keyboards and drums, just like there's always been, but arranger Brian Beattie brought some old friends back into the picture: violins and French horns. Plus, recording in the big state of Texas has given Bill a panoramic sound- screen, filled with verdant and sparkling sounds, all of which allow him access to the depths of expression, allowing a gentle and stirring view of that which we call "soul".
July 20 street date. NON-RETURNABLE. After years of writing songs and singing them into the space in front of him, BILL CALLAHAN has written a book of words to go out into that space as well. 'Letters To Emma Bowlcut' is just that, the letters from a boy to a girl. It is in fact one side of the story, and as such is a meditation on solitude, at times tracing a relationship but mainly making the expressions of a person’s soul secrets that are too difficult to impart face to face. A fiction with a nameless protagonist, 'Letters To Emma Bowlcut' collects sixty-two letters from a few seasons in the son as he reaches repeatedly outwards, addressing himself to Emma whether countering her unseen words or more often, exploring the possibilities of explaining his self. Our writer is up to the tasks, sifting the loose details of his day-to-day, giving emotional weather updates, advising, narrating and delivering dry punchlines with incredible timing.
April 19 street date. Previously solicited as a non-exclusive release. BILL CALLAHAN is back! Essentially an ensemble recorded live in the studio, Callahan's 'Apocalypse' is the corpus delecti. Something happened here! If tape is like meat, this record is the whole hog! Callahan, riding on the back of his band, corrals them all and guides them single-handedly through the valley with love and ferocity. This record makes us wonder what has really happened in the last 100 years, and what will happen in the next 10. The soul of your country called and left you a message. Seven messages.
April 19 street date. Previously solicited as a non-exclusive release. BILL CALLAHAN is back! Essentially an ensemble recorded live in the studio, Callahan's 'Apocalypse' is the corpus delecti. Something happened here! If tape is like meat, this record is the whole hog! Callahan, riding on the back of his band, corrals them all and guides them single-handedly through the valley with love and ferocity. This record makes us wonder what has really happened in the last 100 years, and what will happen in the next 10. The soul of your country called and left you a message. Seven messages.
August 20 street date. We don’t know what this is. The tape arrived in a battered cardboard box. "It’s the single," Bill said, sounding slightly annoyed but later claiming he wasn’t. The usual low blood sugar excuse. One of us hung up. It was Bill. We called back to get the details and maybe suggest he eat something. "I am," he replied. We couldn’t hear any chewing. 'Goat cheese'. Nice. Turns out it is two dub versions of songs from the forthcoming Dream River LP. A 12" dub single to preview the non-dub LP. Hm! We are intrigued. "So you can feel it before you know it." Bill said. Do you say something about Donald Sutherland in one song? One of us hung up. Again. With flashing echo, this one’s a macka! Look for DREAM RIVER, the new album from Bill Callahan, coming out mid-September 2013!
September 17 street date. Cabin crew, prepare for landing! Gliding through low altitudes, Bill Callahan has set his sites on the runway. It is 2013 and he’s ready to land again, with a full cargo for the people down below on earth. From way up high, everything looks so small. But then you land and it swallows you whole. You disappear into the little models, and the trains keep rolling by. And the lights go on and off again. And the trucks on the highway, bound for parts unknown. In the song-world of Bill Callahan, the present realities tumble ecstatically like cloth in the wind - sheets and flags and clothes. These things borne aloft are not simply physical details in the landscape, but the contours of an emotional one as well. Bill’s a cartographer way out there, tracing the coastlines, telling the tales he has discovered along the way. Some seen in life and others in mind’s eye, they float down Dream River with humble eminence. Dialed into the mindset, the Dream River instrumental crew man a hovercraft that bears the songs along, humming deeply with bass and percolating with the abiding resonance of hands drumming on skins, the lively popping of claves. Guitar strums fan into blooms of smoke, sliced through by other guitars taking other forms - shards of mirrors, plumes of ignition, telephone wires, snakes and ladders plunging through the depths of the sky. The musical modes are exquisite, aquatic; shifting in delicate but deliberate undetectable time as Bill’s lyrics wander from yard to yard.
September 17 street date. Cabin crew, prepare for landing! Gliding through low altitudes, Bill Callahan has set his sites on the runway. It is 2013 and he’s ready to land again, with a full cargo for the people down below on earth. From way up high, everything looks so small. But then you land and it swallows you whole. You disappear into the little models, and the trains keep rolling by. And the lights go on and off again. And the trucks on the highway, bound for parts unknown. In the song-world of Bill Callahan, the present realities tumble ecstatically like cloth in the wind - sheets and flags and clothes. These things borne aloft are not simply physical details in the landscape, but the contours of an emotional one as well. Bill’s a cartographer way out there, tracing the coastlines, telling the tales he has discovered along the way. Some seen in life and others in mind’s eye, they float down Dream River with humble eminence. Dialed into the mindset, the Dream River instrumental crew man a hovercraft that bears the songs along, humming deeply with bass and percolating with the abiding resonance of hands drumming on skins, the lively popping of claves. Guitar strums fan into blooms of smoke, sliced through by other guitars taking other forms - shards of mirrors, plumes of ignition, telephone wires, snakes and ladders plunging through the depths of the sky. The musical modes are exquisite, aquatic; shifting in delicate but deliberate undetectable time as Bill’s lyrics wander from yard to yard.
January 21 street date. Dub is a spiritual, abstract, visceral, mystical thing. Finite and Infinite at the same time. Deeply rooted in the earth and embracing outer space. Don’t be fooled by names, Dub has come and gone. Dub is a ghost, a duppy. A duppy of a childhood guppy. Flushed and thriving in the sewers and the swamps. Here you will find versions of the Dream River songs that have been killed and resurrected, spilling tales of the other side of life in a language conceivable only if you let yourself be taken there.
January 21 street date. Dub is a spiritual, abstract, visceral, mystical thing. Finite and Infinite at the same time. Deeply rooted in the earth and embracing outer space. Don’t be fooled by names, Dub has come and gone. Dub is a ghost, a duppy. A duppy of a childhood guppy. Flushed and thriving in the sewers and the swamps. Here you will find versions of the Dream River songs that have been killed and resurrected, spilling tales of the other side of life in a language conceivable only if you let yourself be taken there.
October 21 street date. Until we have a feature film in which Bill Callahan’s words are spoken by the true and deep characters who exist within the songs, the best format will be this lyric book - wait, no, the best format will always be the albums featuring the songs, since they are sung by Bill Callahan, the author and singer, in his own inimitable and completely individual fashion. I Drive a Valence, however, which spans two decades of Smog/ Bill Callahan songs, is a fairly unforgettable look-see; in fact, it’s a definitive-yet-concise trip through the mirror, collecting the lyrics to 70 songs and pairing them with 116 dreamy inkwash images by the man himself. The nuances and ambiguities within plain-spoke expression are at the exquisite center of Callahan’s gift, and the plain fact of words on paper nails them down in a concrete fashion that signals eternity somehow more concretely than sounds in the air can conjure. I Drive a Valence does this for the listener - makes him/her a reader, while putting Bill Callahan’s songs on another shelf where they sit just as entirely as they do on LP shelves around the world. Paperback 8" x 5.5" / 196pp
June 14 street date. As you listen to "Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest", a feeling of totality, of completeness, steals over you, like a thief in broad daylight. Of course it does - you're listening to a new Bill Callahan record! The first one in almost six years! For Bill, it's a different kind of record. He's now writing from somewhere beyond his Eagle-Apocalypse-River headspace, and "Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest" is very much its own beast. The songs are, by and large, shorter, and there are more of them. It took almost all of the previous three albums to add up to that many. Plus, twenty's a lot of songs! But again, it goes a lot deeper than that. After "Dream River", Bill's life went through some changes. Good changes - marriage and a kid - but afterwards, it was suddenly harder for him to find the place where the songs came, to make him and these new experiences over again into something to sing. While sorting it all out, he worked on songs every day - which meant that for a while, there were lots of days simply confronting the void, as he measured this new life against the ones he'd previously known. "Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest" glows incandescent - an entirely acoustic arrangement, sounds and stories shifting seamlessly, almost like one big song made of a bunch of new stories - the kind that only Bill Callahan thinks to sing.
June 14 street date. As you listen to "Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest", a feeling of totality, of completeness, steals over you, like a thief in broad daylight. Of course it does - you're listening to a new Bill Callahan record! The first one in almost six years! For Bill, it's a different kind of record. He's now writing from somewhere beyond his Eagle-Apocalypse-River headspace, and "Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest" is very much its own beast. The songs are, by and large, shorter, and there are more of them. It took almost all of the previous three albums to add up to that many. Plus, twenty's a lot of songs! But again, it goes a lot deeper than that. After "Dream River", Bill's life went through some changes. Good changes - marriage and a kid - but afterwards, it was suddenly harder for him to find the place where the songs came, to make him and these new experiences over again into something to sing. While sorting it all out, he worked on songs every day - which meant that for a while, there were lots of days simply confronting the void, as he measured this new life against the ones he'd previously known. "Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest" glows incandescent - an entirely acoustic arrangement, sounds and stories shifting seamlessly, almost like one big song made of a bunch of new stories - the kind that only Bill Callahan thinks to sing.
June 14 street date. As you listen to "Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest", a feeling of totality, of completeness, steals over you, like a thief in broad daylight. Of course it does - you're listening to a new Bill Callahan record! The first one in almost six years! For Bill, it's a different kind of record. He's now writing from somewhere beyond his Eagle-Apocalypse-River headspace, and "Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest" is very much its own beast. The songs are, by and large, shorter, and there are more of them. It took almost all of the previous three albums to add up to that many. Plus, twenty's a lot of songs! But again, it goes a lot deeper than that. After "Dream River", Bill's life went through some changes. Good changes - marriage and a kid - but afterwards, it was suddenly harder for him to find the place where the songs came, to make him and these new experiences over again into something to sing. While sorting it all out, he worked on songs every day - which meant that for a while, there were lots of days simply confronting the void, as he measured this new life against the ones he'd previously known. "Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest" glows incandescent - an entirely acoustic arrangement, sounds and stories shifting seamlessly, almost like one big song made of a bunch of new stories - the kind that only Bill Callahan thinks to sing.
October 14 street date (2/24/23 for Vinyl). Bill Callahan continues his journey, tunneling underneath the weathered exterior of what seems to be and into the more nuanced life everything takes on in the dark. Bill's got a full band sound going on this one, with him and Matt Kinsey on guitars, Emmett Kelly on bass and backing vocals, Sarah Ann Phillips on B3, piano and backing vocals, and Jim White on drums. Jim and Matt sing on one song, too, and some other singers come in, too. Bill plays some synth here and there, and Carl Smith drifts in and out of the picture with his contra alto clarinet, as do Mike St. Clair and Derek Phelps on brass. Somehow in between them all, you might think you hear the distant sound of a steel guitar. With Bill's voice making the extraordinary leaps and bounds that measure the lives of the songs, the band follow him through passages that seem to invent themselves; other times playing with deeply soulful grooves and/or desperate intensity, as these moments come and go.
October 14 street date (2/24/23 for Vinyl). Bill Callahan continues his journey, tunneling underneath the weathered exterior of what seems to be and into the more nuanced life everything takes on in the dark. Bill's got a full band sound going on this one, with him and Matt Kinsey on guitars, Emmett Kelly on bass and backing vocals, Sarah Ann Phillips on B3, piano and backing vocals, and Jim White on drums. Jim and Matt sing on one song, too, and some other singers come in, too. Bill plays some synth here and there, and Carl Smith drifts in and out of the picture with his contra alto clarinet, as do Mike St. Clair and Derek Phelps on brass. Somehow in between them all, you might think you hear the distant sound of a steel guitar. With Bill's voice making the extraordinary leaps and bounds that measure the lives of the songs, the band follow him through passages that seem to invent themselves; other times playing with deeply soulful grooves and/or desperate intensity, as these moments come and go.
February 24 street date (Vinyl) / (CD available now). Bill Callahan continues his journey, tunneling underneath the weathered exterior of what seems to be and into the more nuanced life everything takes on in the dark. Bill's got a full band sound going on this one, with him and Matt Kinsey on guitars, Emmett Kelly on bass and backing vocals, Sarah Ann Phillips on B3, piano and backing vocals, and Jim White on drums. Jim and Matt sing on one song, too, and some other singers come in, too. Bill plays some synth here and there, and Carl Smith drifts in and out of the picture with his contra alto clarinet, as do Mike St. Clair and Derek Phelps on brass. Somehow in between them all, you might think you hear the distant sound of a steel guitar. With Bill's voice making the extraordinary leaps and bounds that measure the lives of the songs, the band follow him through passages that seem to invent themselves; other times playing with deeply soulful grooves and/or desperate intensity, as these moments come and go.
Please note new street date: January 28. The Blind Date Party hosted by Bill Callahan and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and featuring many guests (Ty Segall, Alasdair Roberts, Sean O'Hagan, David Pajo, Mick Turner, Meg Baird, Six Organs of Admittance, David Grubbs, and Sir Richard Bishop, to name a few) happened online in the fall and winter of 2020-21 - but the party planning dated back to the spring of 2020. Stuck at home, with no gigs in the foreseeable future, Bill, Bonnie and Drag City needed an outreach program to keep themselves busy, not to mention sane. In the absence of any company or anything on the calendar, playing songs they loved was an idea; playing with people they loved, the desire. And making it fun - so pairing someone with someone else having no say in the matter, the essence of the blind date, was the plan. Favourite songs were chosen by artists such as Leonard Cohen, Steely Dan, Billie Eilish, Lou Reed, Robert Wyatt, Hank Williams Jr. etc.; players from around the Drag City galaxy were messaged. Pretty soon, songs were flying back and forth - music in the air!
Please note new street date: January 28. The Blind Date Party hosted by Bill Callahan and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and featuring many guests (Ty Segall, Alasdair Roberts, Sean O'Hagan, David Pajo, Mick Turner, Meg Baird, Six Organs of Admittance, David Grubbs, and Sir Richard Bishop, to name a few) happened online in the fall and winter of 2020-21 - but the party planning dated back to the spring of 2020. Stuck at home, with no gigs in the foreseeable future, Bill, Bonnie and Drag City needed an outreach program to keep themselves busy, not to mention sane. In the absence of any company or anything on the calendar, playing songs they loved was an idea; playing with people they loved, the desire. And making it fun - so pairing someone with someone else having no say in the matter, the essence of the blind date, was the plan. Favourite songs were chosen by artists such as Leonard Cohen, Steely Dan, Billie Eilish, Lou Reed, Robert Wyatt, Hank Williams Jr. etc.; players from around the Drag City galaxy were messaged. Pretty soon, songs were flying back and forth - music in the air!
Please note new street date: January 28. The Blind Date Party hosted by Bill Callahan and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and featuring many guests (Ty Segall, Alasdair Roberts, Sean O'Hagan, David Pajo, Mick Turner, Meg Baird, Six Organs of Admittance, David Grubbs, and Sir Richard Bishop, to name a few) happened online in the fall and winter of 2020-21 - but the party planning dated back to the spring of 2020. Stuck at home, with no gigs in the foreseeable future, Bill, Bonnie and Drag City needed an outreach program to keep themselves busy, not to mention sane. In the absence of any company or anything on the calendar, playing songs they loved was an idea; playing with people they loved, the desire. And making it fun - so pairing someone with someone else having no say in the matter, the essence of the blind date, was the plan. Favourite songs were chosen by artists such as Leonard Cohen, Steely Dan, Billie Eilish, Lou Reed, Robert Wyatt, Hank Williams Jr. etc.; players from around the Drag City galaxy were messaged. Pretty soon, songs were flying back and forth - music in the air!
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