Bill Callahan - Dream River

The guitar work is beautiful. So far it's the best of the Callahan solo records I've heard.

it's growing on me. "spring" and "ride my arrow" are early faves.

so much jazzy flute argh

so much jazzy flute :D

so much jazzy flute hmm ugh well i guess some it is okay

moodles, while this is very loose and rambling in some places, it really is quite different from the looser stuff on apocalypse imo.

love this album

ooooooooooooooooohh JAVELI

n lol

it all seems to flow together more than some of the others

in the interview posted above bill explains that this was his express ambition--to make a record that's all of a piece and without huge jolts between songs so could fall asleep to it (in a good way)

giving praise in a quiet way

This *has* become the record I fall asleep to (in a good way).

the rich or the poor -- who am i working for?

the ny times review was pretty good, i thought: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/arts/music/bill-callahans-dream-river.html?_r=0

yeah that's a smart review

well
so this is very nice

i am enjoying it, enjoying it like i enjoy a new smog record & whatever i get to latch on to on it. there are those lines in small plane; I always went wrong in the same place/where the river splits towards the sea/that couldn’t possibly be/you and me”. it's very graceful. it's interesting to me that he seems to have more like- not formulaically, but willingly grown into this particular mode. it reminds me of those last few philip roth novels, each of which had a dedicated, researched appreciation and respect for some particular vocation, this extensive, didactic, procedural description of what the gravedigger or the jeweler does. & on this & the last couple, writing about boat-painting seems more like that - interrogative, literary - even more than river guard was specifically about swimming instructors. there's something of the reporter or of the premise about it. i get kinda emotional even thinking about smog records being released because they all chronicle, so neatly, my adult life & everything that orbited around their release. so hearing this slightly supper-ish guitar tone is a very strong & redolent thing, his totally blithe, lazy electric strumming. & he's playing with this particular sonic vernacular that's somewhere near fm-radio & somewhere slightly beyond tasteful; like the guitars have this kind of lindsey buckingham resonance but are played off, slightly, twisted to ring more awkwardly (i have no musical vocabulary but i feel like i could probably say minor chords here & get away with it; the skew of cold discovery, of ride my arrow). & within that vernacular he gets to be so playful - what's jazzy about this record to me isn't so much the instrumentation (though, sure, it is, almost in that weird vein of like that john mclaughliny kinda shit i never listened to, peppery flutes & grinding freak-out electro-guitar), but in how the language works. he's so into just holding the moment of singing confi-den~~tial~~, like the first time the word has been used in a refrain for like twenty years, & running it into the ground with isn't/ain't/not, the sense of fixing the music in this rolling present. & this is such a great record for thor. i was always thorgnostic. smog was always the only person to get away with that clumsy, leaden percussion thing but the clippy gallop here is beautiful, the percussion just this ultra light touch. there are bits i love on this more than other parts but how democratically available it is, how loose & open, makes it very satisfying, i think.

hey jed what do you think?

I have never heard a single instrument fuck up a song so much as the flute on this thing. It makes Bill sound like he's singing every line with sarcastic finger quotes. Vibey flutes are like pearl earrings, they work great on some people's songs but imho, not this, no. "Ride My Arrow" is amazing though, "Life ain't confidential, no no no, it's not, it isn't, and it ain't confidential" yesssss

ha, i really disagree? i really do feel the thing he said about trying to make this kinda cohesive, semi-soporific record, & i feel like the flute is part of this kinda peppery gestalt. i was walking to the library today watching leaves fall & twirl to it, the flute is really a part of the shuffly, ornate thing he's doing. & yeah ride my arrow is unreal, the opening four or five lines, i'm so engrossed/.

For me the flute evokes -- in ways I'm not prepared to fully explain now -- "He Loved Him Madly."

Oh, I said "this thing" but I meant specifically "Javelin Unlanding". It reminds me of "Winter Song" except I don't know of the lyrics to "Winter Song" because it's just flute and strings taking up the entire emotional landscape. I didn't even know the name of "Winter Song", I've listened to that record so many times ("Chelsea Girls") but I had to look it up, it's always been "the one with the flutes all over it".

But yeah, specifically that song. The little flute details elsewhere are nice enough. The fiddle reminds me of Scarlet Rivera, which rules.

i can't tell whether you are taking winter song's name in vain, or whether you are using it as a damning comparison, here, i feel like your case against the flute is anaemic either way, what is this.

that said, & in keeping with all of our tentative & non-committal judgments, i really wanted to say something about the fiddle, here, but it was vaguer even than what i wrote above. it's plucked, on something, i think?, & is lovely, but there's something kinda interesting to me about him using something that has such (emotional-landscape-kinda) distinct connotations & mood, for me, that i can't get to the bottom of yet. like something about how serene it can make everything sound that makes it like he's invoking genre.

:) my arguments are deliberately anaemic because that's my cool style. I love "Winter's Song"! but I don't know anything about that song except the flute and strings and guitar, Nico's emotional centre is so obscured by that flute-- beside the point, but Nico herself detested it. I saw the lyric sheet to "Winter's Song" and thought "huh, I know every nuance of that string arrangement but couldn't tell you a single phrase of lyrics". Same is true of "Javelin Unlanding". Vibey flute will always be a foreground instrument and that's super cool on some tracks and some artists (incl. Nico) but to my ears the flute is a strange intruder on this Bill Callahan album.

I deliberately don't get too judgementface on message boards because without fail the lead singer's sister is reading the thread and I don't ever really talk about music like that irl anyway. Also, my own mercurial opinions

ha ha: can a mod take this to 77 so we can go deep in personally dissecting this record's themes. i feel like we are maybe coming at this from slightly different places, but i like your weird aphasia; i don't think i'm so politicised about anybody else's musical make-up but i guess i feel like this record is smog songs, like recent smog albums are, & then as ornate a decoration of his fairly standard guitar rumble as is possible, in which an over-active flute couldn't really distract me from his baritone, you know. but that is cool. i don't know exactly what is doing what musically.

I must admit there's a big gap in my Smog-knowledge (Smnogledge?) bc I only paid lip service to his 2000s albums. Resubscribed with "Eagle"

i think hearing the one a couple before that, a river ain't too much to love, is a cool move that will enhance your life; it was only with the new one, & reading some stuff from interviews that dredged up the minor drama of his namechange, that i noticed how cohesive the last five are. it's the first one in which he gets into this slightly more classical, essentialist aesthetic, i think; he recorded it at willie nelson's studio & the sorta genre i'm implying exists when he uses a fiddle is abundant in reverby harp, various rollicking harpsichord kinda instruments, &c. also: jim white, joanna newsom piano parts, &c&c&c.

track one, swoon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuqXEZT0pxY

& fyi, the correct term is smogducation, & i will school you in supper next

ha, I've heard all those records. "Lip service" means they get played around the house and I've once actively listened, but prior to "Eagle" my preference was for straight jokes Smog, "Julius Caesar" through "Kicking A Couple Around" is gospel to me, not the singer-smogwriter of "Dongs" onward

man look at me callahansplaining

kicking a couple around is the cause of much inner doubt for me because it has all the makings of peak smog, has i break horses, &c, but it's sorta just too-halfway for me. slo-mo smog.

dongs is p irresistible to me but I'm glad somebody repsfor Julius Caesar

I don't think he's made a bad album.

rain on lens has a lot of filler, and some of the songs are bill at his most misterioso and pretentious. at the time it felt like maybe he was running out of steam, but in retrospect it makes more sense.

of course the early noisy stuff (cassettes, first three LPs I guess) is not for all tastes but i think it's pretty brilliant.

like i said, supper is kind of my favorite, but as i spend more time with the last few maybe i'll change that opinion. funny to think that supper is basically in the middle of his career. still seems like a "recent" record to me.

"dongs of sevotion" def. is the best album title though

This is my introduction to Callahan and boy I really really love this.

i still haven't gone back to rain on lens - the only alb. i haven't heard, i think - in ca. 10 years, i kind of like it that way

er, haven't heard, since that first time or two made me say, what is going on HERE, then put it away

Andrew: When you started Smog, the lo-fi tape-swapping scene was seeing a sort of renaissance. Can you talk a bit about the experience of making/self-distributing your own cassettes?

Bill: I can kind of relate to Rod Stewart on this one thing. You go to the Emergency Room to have an excess of semen pumped from your stomach one time and it follows you around for the rest of your life.

lol

A: Your last album, Apocalypse, obviously had a lot political underpinnings to it, which seemed to really embody the album itself. Lyrically, what was your main focus when approaching Dream River?

B: I had been inching my way through The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I worked out a system where I estimated how long I expect myself to live and divided the number of words in The Tibetan Book of the Dead by how many days I expected to live. So that I could read only the amount of words per day that would have me finishing the book near my expected expiration date. Turns out I can read three words per day. That was a big inspiration for Dream River, because it would just stimulate my brain enough to work. Still working on it, obviously! Some people live by, “One day at at time,” I live by “Three words in a day.”

this is p interesting, http://www.noripcord.com/features/waiting-light-day-interview-bill-callahan

He's right about Brit Beer

no he isn't that's nonsense.

bought this today, haven't listened yet. jeez drag city really sticks you for the single-platter vinyl tho

Amazing that you can still buy Supper LP for $12 from Drag City and the new one is $18 (more at stores obv).

i feel like somebody there has to have some kind of traumatic backstory involving mp3 downloads, not including coupons with vinyl feels like almost anti-vinyl to me

i love the sound of this album, the percussion, flutes, and low key grooves bring to mind brighblack morning light without the hippie flakiness (both a good and bad thing). anyway bill is on a roll, every album since a river is great (and as i hinted at above i just bought supper so maybe i will think that one is great too). i can't really rank them either, a lot people seem down on whaleheart but it has diamond dancer, sycamore, and honeymoon child, three songs that would be career highlights for pretty much any contemporary songwriter, imo.

Anyone know if record is cheaper at shows?

:|

:-o

so i listened to this record again this morning and it really hit me this time. it's really wonderful. the heaviness of the record started to set in and the songs' individual characters revealed themselves to me a little bit more. i started noticing more of the great lyrics and singing on here rather than the flutes and congas and grooves that were more immediately apparent at first listen.

the tune that really hit me this morning was "summer painter" -- it reminded me so much of "drover," like this exploration of this vocation and the narrator's confrontation with nature, overwhelming the narrator and acting as a turning point in the song. that point in drover when bill sings quietly, "and my cattle turns on me / i was knocked back flat" and all the instrumentation calls up the sound of cattle storming. and here in "summer painter" all this swirling guitar evoking the hurricane.

only had a few listens, waiting for the album to register beyond the pleasant production... the percussion is interesting and there is some nice electric guitar parts. still, this sounds well-smoothed out, refined BC. vocal melody on "small plane" faintly recalls the same one used on "our anniversary." i would choose rain on lens over this, easily. funny he's receiving near-unanimous praise and exposure for river dream, with all of the (superior) material that has come before it. hope it's a grower

agree with that completely, braunld, i think it *sounds* good but doesn't really interest me. there are some really good lines (The only words i've said today/ are "beer" and "thank you") and some other lines where my reaction was like - eh, did you really do that? - like he's teasing you by making you think he's going to make the most obvious/cheesy rhyme ever... and he does make that rhyme you dreaded. he pauses a bit before the awful rhyme... and does it anyway. i'm 100% sure it's intentional but i don't like it.

schlump, i don't like the flutes. i think they kill "javelin unlanding". i had such high hopes for this track from the title but it's weird goodness is killed by flutes imo.

the opening track is the only one i really like - the "we're all looking for a body/ or a means to make one sing" closer on that track is great but it still doesn't come anywhere close to the highs on apocalypse!

huh. that's really interesting to hear, jed; i'm kinda bummed!, cause your enthusiasm for apocalypse - front to back - satisfies me, i guess knowing there's an appetite for its more drawn-out moments whether or not they're the things that ring out to me. i really like this record more & more, anyhow. it's funny that you & goon-tie are so against the flutes; i listen & don't even hear a flute, distinctly, i'm just playing eyebrow-jazz-flute at whoever i am passing, hearing it on headphones, the flute the punctuation of his verses, not dissimilar to those kinda depth-charge guitar swells he detonates periodically. i think the flutes, too, have this kind of purer feel than some of the other sounds, than the americana-n fiddle, anyway, they're part of the energy & movement, like the shakers are, rather than part of the cinematic dressing. the arrangements on this are really interesting to me, & pleasuably kinda piecemeal upon familiarity; i can't hear javelin or the sing without waiting for their short chapters to end & for the part with the strummed fiddle to start, or for the flutes to climb onto their perch, for the guitar to screech into some fugue. they're very rollercoaster. & lyrically it's very rich, i think - though for sure looser than what he was doing on like jim cain or baby's breath - & here only in a way that is incrementally revealed to me. the only parts that adhere to the kinda dumb-rhymes criticism i can think of are the impossibly grand line, & perhaps the boat-painting jam, but those like ... they aren't distracting me. there's so much just littered that resonates; outside a train sings its whale song / to a long long train, long long gone / then silence comes back alone. & those lines about the war, handled with kinda house-style exquisite grace, i think. for real his kinda jokes here - pilgrim guts, jokes/thank you - are far less interesting to me than just the space in his i guess "less poetic", more straightforward moments. one of my #favouritesmogmoments is him singing TO FAMILY IS ALL YOU CAN DO, in day, & he's on a similar wavelength, here. they make me feel some closeness. i don't know. i like having a new smog record a lot. they are such a nice part of my life.