Bill Callahan
My Days of 58
DRAG CITY
“I am not a robot, and I never will be.” So goes the refrain on “Computer,” a late-album cut on the newest record from prolific songsmith Bill Callahan. It’s a track that, as you might imagine, wears on its sleeve a certain fatigue with the growing mountain of technological slop we encounter in our daily existence. It also shines a light on just how preposterous it would be for a computer to even attempt to replicate Callahan’s whole thing. In fact, the deeper you get into his sprawling catalog, and the more he continues to sure it up with remarkable entries like My Days of 58, it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine anyone but Callahan—human or not—doing what he does best.
So much of the charm of a good Bill Callahan song lies in his ability to walk a tightrope of contradiction. Since his days releasing music as Smog in the ’90s and early 2000s, Callahan has been seen as a virtuoso lyricist, and yet what separates him from so many songwriters is that he seems not to be anguishing over each line, but rather almost tossing things off at random. Even now, three and a half decades into his career, his songs don’t seem to start so much as they arrive. “Driving through the dark, arriving in the rain,” go the opening moments of “Why Do Men Sing,” lines that hit as if Callahan simply woke up strumming and singing. If anything, My Days of 58 is more committed to this than ever. “Improv/unpredictability/the unknown is the thing that keeps me motivated to keep making music,” Callahan said in press materials for the record. It seems the goal this time around for Callahan and his team of collaborators was to give permission for each instrument and each musical idea to embrace Callahan’s discursive lyrical and structural style. A “hobo stew” is how Callahan puts it, and the result is some of the best music he’s released in years.
Of course, lyrics remain at the forefront, and My Days of 58 is perhaps the best example of Callahan’s other primary contradiction as an artist: his propensity to be both nakedly forthright and brazenly cryptic. A lot of that has to do with his delivery, which is somehow earnest and detached in equal measure. Take “The Man I’m Supposed to Be,” a song that directly references a recent cancer scare. “I saw that demon inside me trying to claim my body as its own / Invader, enslaver, little headstone / Tell me, has it grown?” he sings in the same tone he might use to address a babbling brook or a crow perched on a dying tree, as if these life-changing moments are simply a drop in the stream. Later, on “Empathy”—perhaps the most introspective song Callahan has ever released—he delves deep into his relationship with his father and his own efforts at fatherhood. “Let me tell you something you never knew, dad / I’m just like you,” he sings, only to undercut it with a metatextual wink a moment later. “I added these lines last / I don’t know if they’re true.”
This is far from the only example of such playful self-effacement, one of the defining characteristics of a serious artist who never takes himself too seriously. Like all great Bill Callahan albums, My Days of 58 is well-observed, a bit absurd, and wholly singular. And while this singularity is more often a feature than a bug, I tend to doubt anyone not already onboard with the wayward, meandering musings of this 58-year-old songwriter will necessarily be able to find a way in. Thankfully, I don’t think that’s the point. Say what you will, but Bill Callahan will only ever be himself.
