bill callahan (post-smog)

is old; there was an interview with him around the time eagle came out saying he was mixing the thing:

Our Anniversary 7:13
Diamond Dancer 4:00
Bowery 5:59
Held 5:00
Say Valley Maker 6:52
In The Pines 5:51
Cold-Blooded Old Times 5:38
Rock Bottom Riser 7:10
Let Me See The Colts 6:54
The Well 9:05
Bathysphere 5:59

I am a fan of that tracklist.

Also I like how several have two minutes appended to them--broken things with a front of composure stretched to further breaking.

i've seen this dude in concert a dozen times dating back to 1996. he is never less than good. sometimes the long atonal blooze or velvet underground-style raveups are real boring, sometimes they hit the spot.

only two older songs on that list. but happily some stuff from "supper" (my favorite of his LPs).

is this one solo acoustic? don't know how he's been touring recently ... anyway, tracklist looks pretty a+.

nuh uh, will be with band. i wish it was from a little later, since the line up from the last tour were sweet, drove previously kinda stark a river ain't too much to love songs into the ground. think the last line up had a violinist?, and thor drumming, not sure.

i could swap in the pines for river guard or something but yeah it looks good. cover lovely too.

bill is looking sort of beefy lately

http://www.dragcity.com/system/artists/photos/74/large.jpg?1250785302

a bit like aged david carradine no?

http://www.frugal-cafe.com/public_html/frugal-blog/frugal-cafe-blogzone/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/david-carradine.jpg

or not so aged

best smog look recently was wilderness bill:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3485/3200528911_4dcc5e9ea3.jpg

recent setlists look rad- playing distance

oh god i LOVE distance.

"how can something be in any empty box?"

love this dude so much. hilarious.

If...
If you...
If you could...
If you could only...
If you could only stop...
If you could only stop your...
If you could only stop your heart...
If you could only stop your heart beat...
If you could only stop your heart beat for...
If you could only stop your heart beat for one heart...
If you could only stop your heart beat for one heart beat.

― jed_, Sunday, January 10, 2010 9:23 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

otm

Gil Scott-Heron covers I'm New Here. i don't know what to make of it but it is... something.

http://www.kcrw.com/music/programs/tu/tu100308gil_scott-heron_im_n?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:%20kcrw/tu%20%28Today%27s%20Top%20Tune%29&utm_term=Todays%20Top%20Tune

"how can something be in any empty box?"

love this dude so much. hilarious.

lyrics on supper are so sharp and tense and funny and kinda hot throughout

All this talk about Supper makes me want to check it out. It may be the only Smog record I don't own. Just haven't got around to it. My favorite Callahan/Smog record is the one I heard first - Knock Knock.

supper is my fave; i am not a big listmaker but it's one of my favourite things that existed in the last ten years.

knock knock is kinda uneven to me; some of the best songs are on there but the slow loren connors jam and the weird no dancing upbeat stuff make it kind of too broad i think.

yeah, the lyrics from supper are fantastic. probably my favorite album as well.

a friend of mine at the time (who was a big smog fan) felt that he was moving into a too-elliptical and -obscurantist direction, but i actually don't think this is the case w/ supper. my friend cited the song butterflies drowned in wine. but that's a really easy to understand and evocative and inventive mashup of two metaphors (butterflies in the stomach/drowning your troubles in alcohol). i think in the last two albums he can maybe be accused of being opaque but i still love him.

i know it's a cliche but i can't think of a better contemporary lyricist. the guy from drive-by truckers is pretty good though their music isn't particular to my tastes.

Robert Forster's better with tunes.

And he's a Callahan fan too.

you know, i haven't heard any of forster's recent (meaning past 15 years?) stuff. i'm not a huge go-betweens fan though i do like them. always found something a little too..emphatic around the edges about them for my taste. don't know if i could explain it better. both forster and mcclennan obviously wrote some deathless songs.

not sure how to express this, but although i actually think bill's more of a melodist than he often gets credit for being, i don't think the charm of music is principally about novel or tricky 'tunes'. i mean, the 'hooks' in his songs are often in his wry, often very very funny delivery. he tends to use variations on sort of stock, public-domain-type melodies; and typically his inventiveness comes in terms of the way he varies or suspends or elongates the phrasing. and sometimes in terms of his play with the larger form of the song.

btw thanks for that link! that's one of the best reviews of any of bill's albums i've read.

i love "supper" but my favourites of recent albums are this new one and "a river...". it's great that people claim any of the albums to be their favourites but still love another five so much that they can't really decide. i'd be surprised if someone told me "woke on a waleheart" or "rain on lens" were their faves but, unlike other artists, i'd listen again to try and work out why they liked them so much.. and i'd probably end up loving them too.

i agree that he's the best lyricist working now (that i'm aware of) and by some distance.

hm "distance", that's some track.

although as a title "rain on lens" is unbeatable. it's incredibly suggestive.

I did like Callahan's 2009 a lot, btw.

recently i did some design work in the home of a slightly oder english lit academic. on the day i was finishing off i was playing "a river..." and she came rushing through from the next room, where she had been working, to ask me what it was. now she's a bill callahan stan and sent me a text last week saying that she's given up smoking and that the thing that calmed her during a hectic day was the knowledge that she could listen to "too many birds" when her last student had left.

older not odder

although perhaps she is slightly odder now that she's a bill callahan junkie?

i'd say that's a definite.

That Forster review is the best thing I've read on the album.

she got me back by making me read Henry James (unrelated to the smog incident and obviously the other end of the style scale) and now i'm (four books in) a Henry James stan.

xpost was just reading that review. it's great.

Forster touches on it in his review and it always stuns me how Bill can make a simple lyric so evocative.

"i started running/ and the concrete turned to sand"

she got me back by making me read Henry James (unrelated to the smog incident and obviously the other end of the style scale) and now i'm (four books in) a Henry James stan.

The Spoils of Callahan

i just finished that one, my favourite so far.

it always stuns me how Bill can make a simple lyric so evocative

Guns or fireworks are popping
Down in the town
A woman is running
A man jumps up and down
...
I slide in the front seat
The drivers side
To hotwire and hightail crosses my mind
But still in the driveway
Fixed like the stars

I flip on the headlights
And go back inside
The climates controlled
While the battery dies

"clipping the wings of your morning flight"

that line makes me swoon.

The night will end in
Some form of excess
Pants around ankles
Too weak to fully undress

Dude is playing two shows at the Hideout (a very intimate venue) in April. Tickets are $20 (benefit show) and I have no extra money at all right now but I might have to go anyways.

ooh, what HJ have you been reading jed?

oh snap i might have to make it for those shows. wish they were on my spring break.

Ward - "Washington Square", "The Aspern Papers", "Turn of the Screw", "The Spoils of Poynton" and i'm currently on "The Portrait of A Lady" as well as just having bought the fairly large (and pricy, for a paperback) Penguin "Selected Tales" this looks great but I'm slightly put off by the miniscule type - 600 pages of miniscule type.

huh?

"Hop on Pop"

amst, i was answering wards q but i admit it's a strange place to be talking about h. james!

I may be the biggest Callahan fan here, but after three passes, I still think this live album is bland as bread.

Just ordered his book.

Will report back.

I haven't listened to the live album much either. I like some of the new arrangements, mainly of the songs from Woke on a Whaleheart, because that's the only recent album where I'm not a fan of how the album sounds.

I'm a big fan of pretty much everything he did as Smog, but mostly it's been zzzzzzzzzzz since Dongs of Sevotion...

I guess as close as he’ll ever get to chooglin’

I can't follow any of these stories, they go in one ear and out the other and I'm left wondering what each song is about. I got The Mackenzies but didn't like it much, some good points though. I think I know what he's trying to do (maybe) but can't appreciate it at all.

Pigeons is a pretty straightforward story

the new one has this awkward feeling of the music being built around the structure of the lyrics, to the extent that the songs don't really flow or even feel like proper songs sometimes

I like this album and think "Breakfast" the keeper.

has this awkward feeling of the music being built around the structure of the lyrics, to the extent that the songs don't really flow or even feel like proper songs sometimes

― na (NA), Wednesday, September 9, 2020 1:15 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is otm and exactly how I feel about the last few albums

So, Bill & Will re-recorded "Our Anniversary" with Todd Rittman (US Maple/Dead Rider) plopping down some big beefy chunky riffs all over it, and then Jim White (played drums on the original, I just learned) joins John C. Reilly and Tim Heidecker to record their reactions. Not clear if John & Tim had heard it before, but the original is my favorite Smog song and so my reaction was a lot more similar to Jim's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBYxKpXIh1k

Yeah weird.

Seems not really like a cover but the just the lyrics grafted onto something entirely different? On the one hand I like the idea of these two really going for it and Will really reaching (!) on the vocal...on the other its missing that circularity that makes the orig.

...so amazing^

Maybe would dig more if I wasn’t trying to get the same feels

My sentimonies exactly, this is an entirely different song, lyrics do not a song make, but dang is Will ever belting em, whatever this is. And on second listen I would like to retract beefy and chunky and replace it with harmonically crunchy, that's really more Todd.

god love him but Tim and his guitar face :/

Rittman's feel for getting that Crazy Horse sound out of the band is awesome but the lyrics feel like an afterthought -- like nobody wanted to write new lyrics so they just sang "Our Anniversary," or noticed at some point that the phrases could fit into the jam and did that instead of finding what other story the music might want to tell. One of my favorite Smog tunes in the original, dig the jam they're doing here but as Hadrian says it doesn't really evoke the mood the (excellent) lyrics do

I'm just happy to see John C Reilly jamming out to one of the greatest American rock guitarists of all time

This may be one of Will's finest vocal performances, the most range I've ever heard him reach for.

god love him but Tim and his guitar face :/

― early-Woolf semantic prosody (Hadrian VIII), Tuesday, December 8, 2020 7:38 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Tim is a bit over earnest as a musician and music lover, which is an interesting stark contrast against his persona in regards to comedy. I think he's been a little wrapped up in feeling like a Real Indie Rockstar this past year especially, but I don't fault him! Glad he's having so much fun.

haha yeah heidecker is definitely "you guys looked like you were having fun up there"

During the verses Will adopts an almost Robert Plant ca. "Kashmir" tone.

didn't even realize he had a new one out today. i'll give it a shot but i haven't really connected with anything past "dream river" (maybe a me problem)

https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/62fa6349ecee23939248fbd4/master/w_1600,c_limit/Bill-Callahan.jpg

pretty awful album cover, though that's in character at this point

it's with jim white--big plus in my book

this is great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECckgYq1Qs4

sound in video is bad but... can't wait to see this show!

Went to see him in Bristol on Tuesday. Fantastic even though he only played three songs I recognised (don't have either of his latest two albums yet). Saxophonist was a great addition and Bill's between song banter has improved since I saw him last (in '94)!