Bill Callahan – My Days of 58 – Album Review
by Killian Laher

These days, Bill Callahan is well ensconced in cosy domesticity.  He has emerged from this quiet life with his first set of songs in three years.  It opens with Why Do Men Sing, which slowly comes into view with a strummed guitar. The song builds to a wry lyric about Lou Reed waiting for him, all dressed in white, to which he asks, “Lou, what is this place that you took me to?”  The dark and moody The Man I’m Supposed To Be follows.  Here Callahan sings with a very deep vocal, even for him, an ode to living for the moment as he sings “I’ve been living too long in my head… I don’t want to be the man that I am anymore… we take life seriously, laugh in the face of death”  and the track finishes with what can only be described as a strange-as-fuck little laugh.

The self-referencing Pathol O.G. starts out with spoken word, reminiscent of Johnny Cash, before developing into a chugging beat.  The laidback Stepping Out For Air has some gorgeous horns, which pretty much take over the song towards the end.  A love letter to New York, Lonely City has a great sound to it, with no instrument dominating too much.  The light-touch production really works here, indeed across the whole album.

If anything from here on the album gets even more relaxed.  The relatively sparse Empathy again features horns, on a track that’s of the material on his Gold Record album from a few years ago, and it’s followed up by the slow groove of West Texas,  This latter one initially seems unstructured and a bit all over the place, but it’s a real grower, with lovely guitar touches.  Computer is similarly rambling, in a very pleasant way.  The steel guitar-drenched Lake Winnebago has a lightness of touch that’s almost frivolous, until he mentions “last time I was there was to bury mom and dad”.  The album finishes with the really chilled-out The World Is Still, which crawls along beautifully for four and a half minutes.

There are no major surprises on the album.  Bill Callahan has settled into something of a comfort zone, though his songwriting at times evokes the classic country songwriters such as Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson.

Lonely City