-
-
Ad Space
(728 x 90)
Published on 7/24/08
Video
Bill Callahan has been recording poker-faced songs about creepy drifters for nearly two decades. Until Woke on a Whaleheart, he performed as Smog, utilizing the type of fake band name that was popular in the ’90s. Shelving the moniker may be a cosmetic modification, but it signals a change of direction—which usually means a musician has matured and started to write honest, heartfelt songs. In other words, it means a musician has become boring. For Callahan, however, the change has the opposite effect, liberating the singer from the constraints that had grown around Smog. His recent performance at SXSW—accompanied by his pianist and main squeeze, Joanna Newsom, as well as violinist Elizabeth Warren—was a high point of the festival, and Whaleheart ranks among the singer’s most satisfying works.
Callahan’s voice remains mostly dry and apathetic. He has a unique ability to toss off a line like “I’d die in your jails lord / But you’d die by my laws lord” as if he encountered it during a language tutorial. Whereas on past records the musician presented his songs as spare mechanisms for evil poetry, on Whaleheart he surrenders them to his producer, Howling Hex frontman Neil Hagerty. The producer’s arrangements include gnarled electric guitars, violins and the prominent background singing of Deani Pugh-Flemmings, who leads a Baptist choir in Texas. The band’s tenderness mitigates Callahan’s deadpan austerity, recasting the artist as neither solo softy nor brooding Smog cartoon, but rather a fully formed figure who encompasses both personalities. — Jay Ruttenberg
