“It’s important to not / Treat your lifeboat like a yacht,” sings Bill Callahan on “Pathol O.G.,” three songs into his latest collection, My Days of 58. It’s the type of Callahan lyric that you jot down and then can’t remember an hour later why it first struck you. That’s not a knock against Callahan as a songwriter, but a testament to his refusal to traffic in easily digested morsels of wisdom or slogans intended for bumper stickers. Critics might advise you to “live with an album”; Callahan’s records ask you to get lost while hiking through them. Each song could just as easily be a rugged path winding through a dense forest, the wood, brush, and shadow obscuring where and how they might cross or connect at some point. On My Days of 58, those willing to wander alongside Callahan will find the artist as poignant and enigmatic as ever while considering a life with more sunsets behind him than ahead.
As Callahan pushes 60, we recognize his familiar, resonant baritone ruminating on how the ragged pieces of life might still fit together. It gets highly personal at times. As a man of some (albeit not as many) years, it’s unnerving to listen to the reassuring strums of “The Man I’m Supposed to Be” turn worrisome and agitated over a pulsing beat. “And now my biggest fear is not the dying,” admits Callahan. “My biggest fear is that I’ll stop trying.” It’s a devastating blow to consider that the fight might have finally left our hearts. The mood turns beautifully melancholy on “Empathy,” a two-pronged note from Callahan to both his emotionally distant father and to his own kids. As Callahan seeks some common ground with his own dad, he worries that he’s been much the same with his two children. It’s a tender moment over affirming horns when he concludes that “so, so much beauty, so much empathy” got passed down through the gene pool after all.
Several songs see Callahan take to the road to find answers. On “Why Do Men Sing,” he relates the lonely routine of hauling his songs from town to town. According to Callahan’s narration on “Pathol O.G.,” songwriting and performing as a vocation may not have saved his life, but “it gave [him] a life.” Similarly, the light, whistling “Highway Born” champions that nomadic lifestyle as both a birthplace and a source of continued renewal for him. However, what happens when the creative life causes us to isolate ourselves or neglect other crucial parts of life? Callahan’s songs never quite reconcile matters. He’s far more likely to meet a reassuring Lou Reed in a dream (“Why Do Men Sing”) or land on a playful idea like laying down Jacob’s Ladder to cross it instead of climb it (“Pathol O.G.”) than to actually square the circles in his songs. On the latter, there’s nothing left for Callahan to say by the song’s end except “Well, bye.”
Bill Callahan describes My Days of 58 as a “living room record.” And while you can easily imagine these relaxed songs being played on a couple of couches fronted by a Barcalounger, it’s also astonishing how much atmosphere and movement the singer and his band can muster while just shifting on cushions. The desolate “Lonely City” gradually builds a warm, driving camaraderie as hazy backing rises like sidewalk steam, percussion pounds the pavement, and Eve Searls’ backing vocals whistle down the deserted streets of this living room metropolis. Likewise, album masterpiece “Stepping Out for Air” sees Callahan seeking out beauty and answers through the gloom, horns at his back like a northerly wind when he steps outside, as a wingman when he dresses to the nines, and as Gabriel’s own alarm calls him home. It’s a gorgeous seven minutes of colliding sounds that reminds us that Callahan composes and orchestrates as much as he simply sings and strums.
The back of My Days of 58 takes a few stranger turns before finally settling into the airy acceptance of closing cleanse “The World Is Still.” Callahan takes a stand for humanity against soulless automation (“Computer”), playfully settles on a backup resting place in Wisconsin (“Lake Winnebago”), and deciphers his bizarre dreams with gusto (“And Dream Land”). None quite stack up against the best songs on this record, but all are worthwhile diversions with charms of their own. As Callahan demonstrates across My Days of 58, there’s not a question he’s unwilling to ask or a path he’s too paralyzed to venture down, even if the promise of some tidy resolution seems bleak. For a man who once sang, “I started telling the story without knowing the end,” it’s far less about what lies ahead. It’s more about stepping out. [Drag City]
