The first thing you notice is that Bill Callahan is in no hurry. On “The Sing,” the ballad that opens his warm, weary new album, Dream River, words roll by like cloud formations on a calm day: “Drinking… while sleeping… strangers… unknowingly… keep me company.” And afterwards there’s a pause as the line hovers there, like something hanging above the doorway into the record’s peculiar, intimate universe. In the past, Callahan has compared songwriting to an act of carpentry (“There’s this huge block of silence and you carve little bits out of it by making sound”), but never before has one of his records embodied that feeling so richly. Each line on Dream River forms so slowly and deliberately it's like we're watching him whittle it out of oak.
Call it naturalism, polluted with the occasional puff of bleak humor. From his earliest days recording as Smog, Callahan has always been consumed by the natural world. To him, nature is often a taunt, a provocation, a reminder of the smallness of human life. Although he is among music’s most astute observers of human truth and absurdity, in a Bill Callahan song, being a person is often a wry, cosmic joke. The sky can broadcast all the violently beautiful hues of, oh, say, a late-summer sunset, and what’s the best we can do? Late Night With David Letterman (on Apocalypse’s “America!”) and radio interviews with Donald Sutherland (on Dream River’s “Winter Road”) and—it’s always implied, with a meta-chuckle—Bill Callahan records.
Since 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart, the first record released under his own name, Callahan has moved counterclockwise to the rest of the world’s spin. As life has become crowded with text, Callahan has, with each record, become more laconic. As people have grown (ostensibly) more connected, Callahan’s records have increasingly embraced feelings of isolation. Those early Smog records, with their aggressive textures and anarchic sneers, thrashed in opposition to the outside world. Now Callahan sings like someone blissfully oblivious to its churn. “I set my watch against the city clock,” he sang on the opening track of his stunning 2011 record Apocalypse, chuckling with faint surprise. “It was way off.”
A quiet masterpiece, Apocalypse seemed like a culmination of Callahan’s career so far, but it also had a feeling of finality to it. On Dream River, though, the aesthetically restless Callahan has found a few new mountains to climb. He challenged himself to make a more subdued record where the only percussion comes from hand drums and brushes, but he’s challenging himself thematically, too. Dream River finds Callahan tackling a question that has haunted his music for decades: What happens if the guy who once declared, “Alone in my room I feel like such a part of the community,” makes a moving, occasionally honest-to-god romantic record about the power of human connection?
That line comes from “Ex-Con,” a song found on Smog’s 1997 album Red Apple Falls, and it’s striking to consider how much has changed in the years since. Callahan’s baritone has lowered about an octave; he used to sing through his nose but now his voice (a much richer and more resonant instrument) seems to come direct from the murkiest depths of his lungs. His arrangements have also grown more sparse, and on all fronts he’s learned how to say more with less. It’s one of many paradoxes in Callahan’s music, that in abandoning a method of singing more traditionally considered “expressive,” he’s actually learned how to express more. His delivery is animated by the subtlety of tiny gestures, which is why although there are maybe a total of three words on Dream River that a third-grader would stumble over, its musings still feel profound. “The Sing” boasts one of the album’s most undeniably quotable lines—“The only words I’ve said today are ‘beer’/And ‘thank you’”—but the real joy comes from hearing him mutter, “Beer” and “Thank you” a couple of times afterwards, each time intoning it with an almost imperceptible change in tone. Somehow, each “beer” contains multitudes.
Callahan’s learned to use negative space so well that there’s even poetry in the pauses. Take “Summer Painter,” an instant addition to his canon of great songs; for what else can be said of a song that begins, “I painted names on boats…/For a summer” and then unfurls, glacially, like an elliptical yarn spun by a leathery old shanty-dweller who has, without question, seen some shit. Callahan’s learned how to use his voice like a camera (“When the hurricane hit some found it suspicious/That I’d just since left the frame”), and here he’s shooting a wryly funny mock-epic. “Rich man’s folly and poor man’s dream,” he sings, and then pauses for effect, “I painted these.” It’s a masterful little zoom-out, and it only heightens the sense that Callahan’s playing director here, a feeling furthered by guitarist Matt Kinsey’s torrential freak-out when a storm rolls in.
The grandeur, though, is short-lived, and that’s the most profound and affecting thing about Dream River. At its core, this is a record about accepting and even embracing the smallness of human life, and how difficult that can be, given our damnably innate sense of adventure, ambition, and restlessness. For at least four minutes, though, Callahan finds peace and stillness in the form of “Small Plane.” The song is a quiet miracle; an afternoon epiphany told in dream logic and simple language to no one, because his only companion is taking a nap. And yet, what a perfect moment to take stock of things: “I really am a lucky man/Flying this small plane.” It’s a testament to simplicity, or maybe just the power of his wistful, prismatic delivery, that a songwriter once known for his delight in intricate wordplay has never sung more stirring words than these.
To call Dream River “content” or “serene” feels wrong, because there’s still a pang of longing to it. But in all of this album's searching, it does bring back one hopeful find: that maybe the closest we can come to the thrill of wilderness is the adventure of being with another person. “I see the true spring is in you,” he sings at one point, and it might just be the happiest moment on the record. For once he’s not wishing he were an eagle or a tempest or a sunset. He is just Bill Callahan, flying his small plane with a co-pilot by his side, and for the moment at least, that is enough.
