Ex-Urusen man Peter Beatty recently released his debut solo album. It is a reflective album which looks back on his life experiences. You can read our review of this remarkable and fascinating album here.
Peter Beatty joins us in our Why I Love column. He discusses the mysterious world of Bill Callahan and how his music has influenced him.
a world of mystery
I’m wondering if it’s easier to write about an artist you ‘quite like’ than one you really ‘love’. I think that’s because there’s a bit of me that worries that the extremely unlikely might happen: Bill Callahan might actually read this… and not like it.
So, I feel a pressure to pick my words carefully, not mess this up and do the subject justice, but it’s also because I’ve followed Bill Callahan for a long time, and there remains such an air of mystery about him. And yet one thing is not a mystery: some artists firmly do their own thing and stick with it, even if it doesn’t always make sense to others. The result is that you’re always being delivered their personality through their music. For me, that’s Bill Callahan.
THE FIRST TIME
It was probably around 2009 I think I first got into Bill Callahan. It’s now been long enough that I can start to understand the specific things that make me a fan, but also because it’s long enough for me to see the bigger journey of an artist – including looking back into everything he recorded and performed under the name Smog. When compiling specifics, the overarching theme became clear – that there’s a particular eccentricity, a set of idiosyncrasies, that create a brilliant strangeness around Bill Callahan. It’s like he’s simultaneously hugely revealing, and yet remains mysterious because you don’t understand everything.
His voice can feel so close that it’s like he’s speaking directly to you. And while it so often sits in the same place, he’ll suddenly sing out more, or like Fred Neil would occasionally do, he’ll drop to a deep note with the last word of a line, suddenly getting your attention. Lyrically, he keeps me guessing and reminds me that not everything needs to make sense. So when it does, the result can be a moment of enlightenment, or even comedy. Regardless, I always feel like it’s coming from a place of truth.
IT DRAWS YOU IN
With some of his songs, it feels a bit like when someone comes up with a really simple invention, and everyone asks, “but of course! why has no one come up with that before?”. ‘Too Many Birds’ is such a great example. The beauty, simplicity and spaciousness at the start is just a disguise for the greater complexity that develops and draws you in. The way he gradually creates the line “If you could only stop your heart for one heartbeat”, he delivers you a different meaning each time around, until he finally gives you the whole sentence.
And while I love all the guitar in Bill Callahan’s music, so often there’s a rawness in his songs that’s delivered by other means – a minimalist keyboard line, a moment of comedy, an occasional swearword., or a dirty rhythm section, like in the song ‘America!’.
Another aspect in his songwriting I love, is that it fires up my visual side – with both the lyrics and the instrumentation it can sometimes feel like strange paintings are being created. In ‘Rococo Zephyr’, it’s as if a narrator is setting the scene at the start of a film, immediately making you a willing passenger, or in ‘The Wind And The Dove’ it feels like an ancient story or parable is being depicted, or you’re being invited on a quest.
At other times it can feel like you’re rummaging through a trove of unidentified memories, out of place thoughts or recollections of failure – a self-obsessed, poignant, intimate turmoil wrapped in melancholic lo-fi. Bill Callahan is simultaneously the ‘everything drawer’ in my kitchen (the drawer that, I think, most people have somewhere in the house, that becomes the place you put anything that doesn’t have a place) and also a mystical experience.
Image: Hanly Banks Callahan
THE JOURNEY
I’ve no doubt that Bill Callahan has rubbed off on me as a songwriter. Throughout my new album Different Flowers, the idea of a personal journey, travelling through recollections of memories, with very visual lyrics painting scenes. Perhaps my songs ‘Go Gently’ and ‘There Used To Be Trees’ are good examples. While the lyrics and imagery in There Used To Be Trees create an otherworldly apocalyptic feel, Go Gently is about death and family, so has a poignancy I hope Bill would approve of. In the latter, the vocal feels close and deep, and the night-time setting, percussion and soaring clarinet all trying to create a strange a strange atmosphere and set you off on a mystical journey.
Which brings me to his journey. Going through Bill Callahan’s catalogue, his early albums arguably produced his best songs, and therefore there’s a logic in picking one of those albums as my favourite. But in fact, it’s his later album ‘Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest’ that I think might be his masterpiece, and my favourite, precisely because I feel it reveals some a soul-searching journey and a maybe chapter where he may have felt challenged as an artist. Opening with the lyrics “well it’s been such a long time… why don’t you come on in”, later admitting in a song “it feels good to be writing again” and asking, “where have all the good songs gone?”.
It really speaks to the songwriter in me, that you fear inspiration will never revisit you. Perhaps this album lifted a real weight off him, since his follow up ‘Gold Record’ opens with the comedic line of the first song ‘Pigeons’ – “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash, well, the pigeons ate the wedding rice, and exploded somewhere over San Antonio”.
WHAT COMES AFTER CERTAINTY?
I went with a friend and fellow fan to see Bill Callahan at the Hammersmith Apollo – it was the last big gig I went to before the pandemic. It was one of those nights you bump into loads of people you know, and I have spoken to many others since who have said they were there.
For most of the gig my friend and I were sat in the middle near the front, but at some point, we were stood at the side, and looking over at the audience I really saw just how enraptured everyone was – it felt magical. If I recall, he wasn’t wearing shoes and there was one moment where he did a little hop and a skip, which momentarily removed a veil of steady cool, as if he had accidentally revealed his joy at being there in this moment.
The gig told me that while I love Bill Callahan’s songs and albums, he is an artist who brings a whole new amazing energy to his material live, and that’s exactly why you should go and see him with his band. Shortly after first submitting this article, Bill Callahan proved this by releasing his latest album ‘Resuscitate!’, a live album recorded in Chicago in 2022 during the tour for his album ‘YTI⅃AƎЯ’. The album features seven songs from ‘YTI⅃AƎЯ’ and a few from his back catalogue, including one from his Smog days. On ‘Resuscitate!’ Callahan has allowed the songs to grow into something else that’s heavier, bolder and more dramatic, and there are moments when the other musicians are allowed extended spaces within which to be more wildly free. Listen to ‘Coyote’, ‘Naked Souls’ or ‘Planets’ and you’ll hear the alto sax do exactly that. In Callahan’s own words the live versions of the songs took on ‘superpowers’.
THE LIVE EXPERIENCE
Listening to ‘Resuscitate!’ has been a fantastic reminder of Callahan’s live experience, and the gig in 2019 remains one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to. That’s why I’m so excited to be going to one of his shows at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London this September.
After that gig in 2019, my friend and I ended up in a bar, somehow hanging out with Bill Callahan’s support act, a brilliant band called Dallas Acid. They shared stories of touring with him, and for about an hour it was rumoured he would be joining us. Bill never showed, and while it seemed a disappointment at the time, I’m so glad he didn’t. With what they say about not meeting your heroes, I feel certain that not meeting Bill Callahan maintains a mysteriousness for me. As he sung it himself: “And what comes after certainty? A world of mystery”. That is of course, unless I meet him at a bar, post-gig, in September.
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