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by Amy Moore
What:
Bill Callahan
Where:
Café Eleven in St. Augustine
When:
8:30 pm on February 22, 2008
Bill Callahan used to be known as Smog. With such an ambiguous name, listeners didn’t automatically know whether this was a band or just one guy. Like the name, Smog’s songs were sort of enigmatic—while they felt like a very personal glimpse into a bedroom fitted with a tape recorder, there was also a tight sense of control, as if this Smog was only letting you see what he wanted. The one theme woven throughout Smog’s songs was the safety and comfort his characters felt when unencumbered by others; whether watching from outside or holed up in a room, his narrators were almost always alone…or soon to be.
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With his newest album Woke on a Whaleheart, Bill Callahan has done two things he never did before: ceded some control (Neil Michael Haggerty produced and arranged), and dropped the name of Smog. The result is his most optimistic-sounding album to date. So, who is Bill Callahan now? EU asked Bill some questions to help build that picture.
EU: In an interview years ago, you said you didn’t keep up with politics too much. Do you keep up with politics these days? Are you a voter?
Bill Callahan: I vote, yes. I cast a vote or go through the motions of it. I’m not really sure if my vote gets counted.
EU: What’s your take on the possibility of having Clinton or Obama as president - do you think either of these possibilities will demonstrate that we as a country have moved past some of the prejudices we’ve been known for in the past?
BC: Well, we have a jackass for a president now but it doesn’t lessen my prejudices against jackasses. Hillary Clinton makes me wary. I don’t like the way Bill is on her shoulder all the time, sticking his nose in the camera. Dynasties are no good. Bred from fear. And there’s something creepy about Hillary and Bill together. They’re like dissipated swingers on the prowl. He’s like the Matthew McConaughey character in Dazed and Confused. I’d like to see Obama win. He knows something about street life. But I don’t think it will do much for racism.
EU: It seems as though a lot of your songs before ‘Woke on a Whaleheart’ focus on being alone in a room or watching from the outside or above it all (The Orange Glow of a Stranger’s Living Room, Teenage Spaceship, Running the Loping), but your newest songs seem to allow someone into the room with you (A Man Needs a Woman or a Man to Be a Man). To speak about that song specifically, it seems to suggest the difference between isolated, um, self-love and actual, honest interaction. Are this song and album representative of a new willingness to let go of a little of that isolation and to allow others to participate in the process?
BC: Hey, someone’s been listening to my music! You’re right and I think you are making a point I haven’t heard anyone making before. A certain role my narrators often have—it is of being alone and stating something. It is in being alone that the focus is on the narrator. But being alone is nothing to be proud of. It’s just something that happens sometimes.
EU: Do you ever see yourself making a living in any other way than playing music?
BC: Been thinking about this lately because of the way the world is going. Everything is free, like Gillian Welch said. Music, movies, magazines. Anywhere where I’d previously thought I could make a buck is disappearing. All that will be left in a few years is being on a computer manufacturing line or serving food to rich folk.
EU: In an interview a while back, you said Chicago was a place people go to die, and then in another you say you left San Francisco where everyone was kind of hip and cool to live in another California town that you felt was more realistic. Do you find it easier to write music in an environment where you’re not surrounded by artists and hipsters? Are there any things you like about city life, or do you prefer small, working class towns?
BC: I am a city boy by nature. I’d say all of the outside falls away to silence when you are trying to make music though. I don’t find being in nowheresville to be very stimulating to creativity. Taking a week at a rented beach cabin can be good for concentration. In all that there is in a city there is something there also that propels you to leave it, to sort of ‘be through’ with it. Cities are edible in this way. And you are edible in cities, too.
EU: Speaking of edible, what’s your biggest comfort food?
BC: I think the term ‘comfort food’ refers to how comfortable said food would be to lie down on if there was enough of it to make a bed. A bed of mashed potatoes. Yes. Mostly my favorite comfort food is anything made for me by a loved one.
Tickets are available online at cafeeleven.musictoday.com.
Article Published in the 2-21-08 Issue of EU Jacksonville
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