Featured Artist: Bill Callahan

General Impression (from Cornu Conan Malone)

Bill Callahan is a poet, whose voice draws you in and words will resonate with the post existential agnostic in you. Bill is unknowingly lending one of his songs as the theme song for my Absolute Agnostic blog (absoluteagnostic.blogspot.com).

For a void without a question is just perverse
This is the end of faith, no more must I strive
To find my peace, to find my peace in a lie
This is the end of faith, no more must I strive
To find my peace, to find my peace in a lie

It's time to put God away
(I put God away)

Bill also quotes "Eid Ma Clack Shaw" and other crazy words of wisdom from his own subconscious dreaming self and is largely the musician I would be if a woodchuck could chuck wood (within the folk/singer song writer genre anyway.)

Check him out!

Career overview (from yes, Wikipedia)

Callahan started out as a highly experimental artist, using substandard instruments and recording equipment. His early songs often nearly lacked melodic structure and were clumsily played on poorly tuned guitars (possibly influenced by Jandek, whom Callahan admired), resulting in the dissonant sounds on his self-released cassettes and debut album Sewn to the Sky. Much of his early output was instrumental, a stark contrast to the lyrical focus of his later work. Apparently, he used lo-fi techniques not primarily because of an aesthetic preference but because he didn't have any other possibility to make music. Once he signed a contract with Drag City, he also started to use recording studios and a greater variety of instruments for his records.

From 1993 to 2000, Callahan's recordings grew more and more "professional" sounding, with more instruments, and a higher sound quality. In this period he recorded two albums with the influential producer Jim O'Rourke and Tortoise's John McEntire, and collaborated with Neil Hagerty. Callahan also worked closely with his then-girlfriend Cynthia Dall in his early career, and they contributed vocals to each other's albums. After 2000's Dongs of Sevotion, Callahan began moving back to a slightly simpler instrumentation and recording style, while retaining the more consistent songwriting style he had developed over the years. This shift is apparent in albums such as Rain on Lens, Supper, and A River Ain't Too Much to Love.

Smog's songs are often based on simple, repetitive structures, consisting of a simple chord progression repeated for the duration of the entire song. His singing is strikingly characterized by his baritone voice and a style of delivery without being over-emotional. Melodically and lyrically he tends to eschew the verse-chorus approach favoured by many contemporary songwriters, preferring instead a more free-form approach relying less on melodic and lyrical repetition. Themes in Callahan's lyrics include relationships, moving, horses, teenagers, bodies of water, and more recently, politics. His generally dispassionate delivery of lyrics and dark irony often obfuscate complex emotional and lyrical twists and turns. Critics have generally characterized his music as depressing and intensely introverted, with one critic describing it as "a peep-show view into an insular world of alienation." [1] Despite this there is also a broad swathe of joy throughout Callahan's work and more attentive critics have picked up on Callahan's tendency to black humour, a tendency often confused with a depressed mental state or a genuine obsession with the morbid, a confusion no doubt caused by his deadpan vocals.

Cat Power (Chan Marshall) recorded Callahan's song "Bathysphere" on her 1996 album What Would the Community Think and also covered another Callahan song; Red Apples, on her Covers Record, released in 2000.

Smog's "Cold Blooded Old Times" appears on the High Fidelity soundtrack. The song "Vessel in Vain" (from Supper) was also used on the soundtrack of the independent British film Dead Man's Shoes in 2004. In October 2007, Cadillac released a commercial which featured Smog's song "Held" and Bob Dylan driving a 2008 Escalade through the desert.

In 2007, Callahan released Woke on a Whaleheart, his first solo album released under his own name. Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle followed in April, 2009. Both recordings were licenced through Drag City, worldwide. In 2009, Callahan contributed cover songs to three separate tribute albums to Judee Sill, Kath Bloom, and Merge Records.

He currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Do Judge a Book by its Cover

Unlike books, you should judge an album by its cover. Does the cover promote the artist as a product, and if so are you buying? Is there depth, is there a story, is there some quirk, sense of history, is there some visual hook that finds some thread of interest within you, resonance with the soundtrack of your daydreams, workouts, jogs, car drives - resonance with the soundtrack of your life.

If so, pick it up give it a listen, chances are you'll know within 20 seconds if you've got a fit. If necessary, go to track 2, but if an artist doesn't resonate with me by track 1 or 2 they go back to the bin. The judge the album by its cover method will let you down occasionally, but likely the essence of the music within is conveyed even in a font, a color scheme, photo or title.

Whether at your local library or perusing online, judge an album by a cover, pick it up or click on it and give it a listen. Have fun with randomly discovering music new to you.

And of course, if you are not a Pandora Internet radio listener yet, you have to sign up at Pandora.com. It's free (40 hours per month) and you can design your own stations by entering an artist or song or selecting prefabricated genre stations. The station will randomly select other music with similar musical tonalities and thus introduce you to music you are likely to like, but that you wouldn't hear on your local Clear Channel radio station or otherwise discover.

Happy listening!