CLEARING THE AIR bill callahan lightens up and leaving smog behind. wordsby saelan twerdy
illustrationby john antoski
F
or nearly twenty years now, Bill Callahan has roamed the American musical underground as Smog, sketching the dark corners of the everyday with his unmistakable drawling baritone. Throughout the twelve full-length albums he’s recorded for Chicago’s Drag City label, Callahan has explored an interior landscape of emotional devastation with singleminded implacability. Initially notorious for his hissy lo-fi recordings and fatalistic depictions of obsession, dimlyremembered trauma, and love gone sour (not to mention his ill-fated affair with Cat Power’s equally-depressed Chan Marshall), Callahan moved throughout the mid90s towards a more meditative and polished acoustic approach. Like a good cheese, the man has grown softer with age: Callahan has always had a deft touch with moral ambiguities and an ear for the poetry of material objects, but in recent years, he’s grown ever more philosophical, and his sound has followed suit. Where he once epitomized the isolated artist, recording solo to four-track (or cassette deck), he’s recently embraced a warm, vintage studio gloss and enlisted the aid of firstrate musicians to realize a twangier vision, with hints of Southern gothic wisdom. Which brings us to his new album, Woke On a Whaleheart, his first-ever release under his own name. Maybe it’s his romance with fellow Drag City songstress Joanna Newsom, but Callahan has never sounded so rooted and relaxed. Whaleheart’s nine songs roll easy, like a wide, slow river, taking in everything they can on their way to the ocean. It’s a deep sound, the kind that should last for years, carving new canyons into the landscape, and the pleasure in every note shows that it’s a good time to be Bill Callahan. Color: Let’s have the most obvious question first: what made you decide to record this album under your own name, rather than as Smog? BC: It was time for a change. A radical change in the way I approached this thing that I wake up to every morning. Or most mornings. The word “Smog” has made me cringe a little for about the past five years or so. Whether in context of my music or just watching a documentary about China. I wanted to change to my name for A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, but my record company begged me not to. They said that every single band without exception that has changed names on Drag City has had a big drop in sales. And it takes a couple years of touring and releasing things and telling people about the change. It takes that couple of years to get back to where you were! I welcome that challenge. A lot of people just know my music through the band name. They might love Smog but they would say, “Who is Bill Callahan?” I have not promoted my face or myself as a “personality.” I have just put the music out there. For better or worse. The idea of changing to my own name for A River... was something of an afterthought. And I think that’s why my record company realized they could get me to call it Smog for one more record. For Woke on a Whaleheart, I had
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