bill callahan (post-smog)

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...

Nah. A River Ain't Too Much to Love and Sometime I Wish We Were an Eagle are two of his best imo.

the book is real good, i think. i thought he might have some problems maintaining the whole grizzled, laconic thing through a whole narrative, but nuh uh. he makes such great use of the elliptical nature of a one-sided epistolary novel, too; "i don't think there is such a thing as ceiling wax".

also you crazy if you've been tuned out since dongs. the lps are way more like albums, since, and i'd put everything bar maybe whaleheart above DOS.

(but yeah the live record just doesn't sound right, bar the well, which sucks because he can be alternately entrancing & rollicking, live).

man is p much the only current singer songwriter i listen to

you crazy if you've been tuned out since dongs

Not really tuned out -- I've heard all the recent albums, just haven't enjoyed much of it lately.

I've also seen him live a few times in Austin, his longtime residence, and think he's a bore live. Sorry...

Nah. A River Ain't Too Much to Love and Sometime I Wish We Were an Eagle are two of his best imo.

― circa1916, Tuesday, August 24, 2010 2:45 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

def. agree with this

^^^^^

thirded.

live album is OK. good, not great. i know i'm a douche for saying this, but i have live shows i got from the internets that are even better.

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

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, March 9, 2010 7:55 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

― jed_, Tuesday, March 9, 2010 8:30 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark

OTM.

I listen to Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle a lot. It's amazing. DAMN the tastemakers and the cannibals

:-)

I've also seen him live a few times in Austin, his longtime residence, and think he's a bore live. Sorry...

― ilxor has truly been got at and become an ILXor (ilxor), Tuesday, August 24, 2010 3:52 PM Bookmark

presumptuous apologies...

I saw him at the Starry Plough in Berkeley with ILX poster AKM and he was pretty great, I thought. He has a presence. Also he came and played in the middle of the crowd for the encore.

http://cdn.pitchfork.com/media/callahanposter.jpg

http://pitchfork.com/news/41420-bill-callahan-announces-new-album/

hoo-rah

fantastic. i wasn't expecting something so soon.

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

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, March 9, 2010 7:55 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

― jed_, Tuesday, March 9, 2010 8:30 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark

OTM.

I listen to Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle a lot. It's amazing. DAMN the tastemakers and the cannibals

― Edgware Wolf in London (admrl), Saturday, September 25, 2010 6:22 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark

otm

otm

DAMN the tastemakers and the cannibals

Bill Callahan
Apocalypse PRE-ORDER

APRIL 19TH RELEASE DATE
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.

pre-order where?

what the

there is a thread for this album iirc

i think i got that from an insound email.

show last night was amazing. backed up by just a drummer and a guitarist, which i was a little concerned about, but it worked well on pretty much every song ("eid ma clack shaw" was the only one where the arrangement didn't work for me, but it might have also been a sound issue). the one-two punch of "america!" and "our anniversary" was especially devastating. it seems like he's not interested in playing old stuff at all, i think "our anniversary" was the oldest song in the main set, though he begrudgingly played "the river guard" and "bathysphere" as encores (he asked for requests, everyone was yelling out songs, he said "i'm glad you guys don't write the setlist.")

sometimes i read bits of the novel that crop up somewhere online or whatever & they totally crack me up or floor me:

You are the reason I get out of bed. To tell you that I have gotten out of bed.

i have a recording of a reading from it that's incredibly compelling, sorta someway between what you get from reading it and the very tense, charged, unfurling kinda quality that you get from seeing him sing. & because i read it when it came out - and it has that kinda woolf-ish flow of just going through your head to serve the purpose of just momentarily passing through you & leaving you slightly adjusted by exposure - i've forgotten most all of what is said in the book, remembering just the mood and tone of it. and so it's striking anew to hear the lines read aloud. i will probably retrieve my copy and read it again & like it more, i think. also maybe i will put my copy in the bathroom (huge compliment, setting aside).

the last record is still doing it for me, also. i think the thing that's appealing about baby's breath, particularly in reference to the v speculatively biographical abortion reading of it that people discuss, is that it gives you a set of circumstances to assume that it's based on, and then use as a basis to see his transformation of the facts of - turning the thing into an extended gardening metaphor and seeing the craft in being able to do so. i feel bad for trampling into that kind of intense fan reading, but he is the only thing that i feel that awed by as to want to tear apart in search of better understanding.

you know that baby's breath is a flower though (the american name for Gypsophelia).

where did you get the recording of the reading, schlump?

as an aside i'll say that i've done a 180 on Apocalypse and now think it may be his best record.

did not know, thanks for that. adding that to my case files.

reading at: http://culture.wnyc.org/articles/talk-me/2011/feb/07/talk-me-bill-callahans-letters-emma-bowlcut/
there's this v amusing q & a, and i sort of set aside the reading for later; it popped up on my headphones unexpectedly & caught me at this appropriately blank, receptive, zoned-out moment as i was leaving work a few weeks back, it's really lovely to listen to , though i was more primed then than i usually might be to listen to an extended reading of letters, etc.

i'm v fond of the new one, though need to spend more time with the second side. i don't think i'd appreciated how distinct his last five years (the a river/bill stuff) have been from what came before, until this one compounded it. like i was listening back to supper, & then to the last one - i always loved truth serum so much, because it's so well plotted and clever & amusing, but even so i hear it and think that he wouldn't try that shit now - there's an appeal to it that he seems to be sort of beyond, a maturity now that comes through a confident breadth and a way with these elliptical stories (which i guess he was doing back then, too).

his contribution to the Chris Knox compilation 'Stroke' just came up on iTunes--stunning.

Thanks for this. Illuminating. Bill reads GQ! :)

guys in shiny suits