Bill Callahan – My Days Of 58 Reviewed: Compelling meditations on humanity, mortality and the everlasting

Bill Callahan - My Days Of 58

★★★★

DRAG CITY

Wary, maybe, of ending up like the platitudinous late-night-TV singer he lambasts on his 2020 track Protest Song (“I’d vote for Satan / if he said it was wrong”), Bill Callahan rarely chooses to comment explicitly on the problems and perils of modern life. Over 35 years, Callahan’s songs have been more likely to emerge from dream landscapes, a surreal America of drovers and horses or - increasingly since his 2019 album Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest- the domestic cocoon of love and family, than any ripped-from-the-headlines complaints about the world outside.

Yet on My Days Of 58, the ninth album he has issued under his own name since retiring his Smog alias in 2007, there’s a track called Computer, a clear warning (“Hey human!”) against any technology that seeks – with or without permission – to access and modify your mind. A musician raised on hardcore and punk railing against Autotune is unsurprising, but Callahan – now 59 - moves beyond mere grumbling with a heavy prophecy that people are being groomed into a fully artificial future “until the human voice sounds so flawed and raw that we just quit it.”  Over a tangle of guitar that gently echoes the demanding old-school squall of a dial-up modem, he sings “It’s kind of funny / kind of sad/ how easily we take the question ‘are you human?’”, before declaring. “Well I’m not a robot and I never will be / Sing it, sing it with me.”

My Days Of 58 doesn’t need to check boxes containing traffic lights to prove it lives: these are songs of vitality, wit and nerve, Callahan’s idiosyncrasies setting a strong password to guard his own humanity. The core musicians gathered around him – guitarist Matt Kinsey, the ever-astonishing Jim White on drums, Dustin Laurenzi on saxophone and touch-sensitive horn arrangements – are the touring band captured on full fractal flow on 2024’s live album Resuscitate; their magical capillary system is augmented by fiddle, piano, trombone, pedal steel, and the lovely unsanded backing vocals of Eve Searls. Adding to the warmth, there’s a real sense of being in the room with them here – you can almost sense the creak of a shoe on a floorboard or a pedal, hear a hand raking through hair or rubbing an eye. (Adding to the sense of human mark-making, each musician has signed their own name on the album credits).

It's a long way from the shuttered, inscrutable younger Callahan who once sang of feeling like a teenage spaceship or Travis Bickle – even “a robot by the river” on Smog’s uncanny 1997 album Red Apple Falls. Nearly seven years and three albums after Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest, the first record to emerge from Callahan the family man, listeners should probably be acclimatized to his mid-life openness by now, but even by his recent standards, My Days Of 58 exhibits a clarity, a directness – even, on the tender depressive ramble of Stepping Out For Air, a sharp vulnerability. “Help Help,” sings Callahan, in a suddenly tiny voice, “go away.”

There are themes here that have long intrigued him: the meaning and mechanics of songwriting; the dynamics of family; the mysteries of the spiritual realm. It's a record full of rapture and visions, the exhortations of somebody who might be about to handle a rattlesnake or heal a child: “Lay that ladder down, boy!”, he repeats, or “Gabriel! Come blow your horn!”. A soured, tense groove reminiscent of Supper’s Butterflies Drowned In Wine, The Man I’m Supposed To Be enters into a fierce fight with mortality, ending with Callahan singing “We take life seriously / laugh in the face of death”, before emitting a small, bright, haunting laugh. There are quiet thoughts about the future, the campfire sway of Lake Winnebago turning his 2019 harrowing-of-hell version of Lonesome Valley into more of a permanent vacation on the other side.

As with Nick Cave, none of this simply feels like spiritual cosplay. Callahan returns to ideas expressed on 2023’s Coyotes (“we tend to stick together… holding hands through many lives”). On the Knock Knock-era chug of And Dream Land, he sings “You and I died as children / mown down / a couple of bullets…ten lives together and counting.” Those who preferred Callahan when he “used to be darker” (as he sang on Jim Cain) might appreciate the mix of heartfelt sentiment and disturbing image, particularly when accompanied by the singer’s impression of gunshots. The robots, you feel, would struggle to synthesize that.

Other worlds can be glimpsed at the corners of these songs. The superb Pathol OG starts with a Johnny Cash style intro contemplating his songwriting vocation: “It started out as a way for me to communicate with other people and myself and the spirits.” That’s something he does on Why Do Men Sing?, where he has a “terrifying” dream he’s about to die; his spirit guide leads him to an improbably heavenly Lou Reed, who instructs him to “let it ride mama / into a dwarf star / or a black hole / or someone else’s soul.” You might first laugh at Callahan’s Reed impression but that reaching for a familiar – and one would think unsuitable - hand to guide him through the unknowable is deeply affecting.

The cross-world communication continues on Empathy, which begins as a remarkable empty-chair dialogue with his father - “You said you got by without a father / so you figured why should I have one” – before Callahan looks at his own children and finds only joy. What could have been a petulant man-hands-on-misery-to-man stab at his past instead becomes a glorious act of understanding, radiantly embodying the song’s title. It ends with a slight musical theatre twinkle, but it’s not a hollow performance – as a love song to the ancestors and a promise to posterity, it’s as unaffectedly beautiful as anything in Callahan’s catalogue.

The album closes with the abstracted, ambient The World Is Still, bird-like Irish whistle circling over its head as Callahan sings “nothing has changed and nothing ever will”. There is a lot of compelling noise on this record – the hush of the drums, the glowing brass, the grain of Callahan’s luthier-polished voice, the ghost of Lou Reed  – but it’s that laugh at the end of The Man I’m Supposed To Be that keeps on echoing, the sound that seems to answer all the questions this record asks. Hey human. Sing it with him.

My Days Of 58 is out February 27 on Drag City.

ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV

Tracklisitng:

1. Why Do Men Sing
2. The Man I’m Supposed To Be
3. Pathol O.G.
4. Stepping Out For Air
5. Lonely City
6. Empathy
7. West Texas
8. Computer
9. Lake Winnebago
10. Highway Born
11. And Dream Land

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