One of the words that Bill Callahan uses most frequently on Resuscitate!, a live album recorded in March 2023, is “dreams.” We’re coming in and out of them on “First Bird.” They’re places of transmogrification, danger, and in fact the ultimate reality on “Coyotes.” “Dream, baby, dream,” Callahan seems to ad lib on “Natural Information,” a song about pushing his infant daughter down the street, now reinforced with the greatest lesson this wised-up dad could ever teach her. It’s 11 years since Callahan released his 15th album, Dream River, a record he intended to be the last thing the listener heard at night, guiding them tenderly to their sleep state. Since then, marriage, fatherhood, and a new embrace of expansive thinking have taken the 58-year-old songwriter to a whole other metaphysical plane. I often think of beautiful coincidences as being like an eclipse—two celestial bodies lining up for just a second that you’re lucky enough to catch—and Callahan has become a stargazer for those moments in his writing, especially as he observes the habits of his young family; his melodies, too, have become more open, transcendent, reaching for something beyond.
That night at Chicago’s Thalia Hall, Callahan and his band attained a sort of dream state, sounding generative and otherworldly. “The date was mid-point in the tour,” Callahan writes in the accompanying notes, “so I knew we’d be as hot as we were going to get. Not too green, not too brown.” (He also notes that he tries to work only with venues, such as Thalia Hall, outside the Live Nation/Ticketmaster nexus, and maybe that freedom wriggles in.) In opening song “First Bird” alone, Callahan, guitarist Matt Kinsey, tenor sax player Dustin Laurenzi, and drummer Jim White voyage further than most bands ever do in a whole set. It starts off sounding like a mysterious night on the plains, full of skittish life forms, prowling bass, flashes of woodwind. As Callahan grows more fervent, the instruments vibrate with anticipation, and then come to tumble in and out of sync with their leader’s mercurial, deeply felt phrasing. It peaks with Callahan cawing “Tall! Tall! Tall!,” as if he were that titular first bird; after six minutes, the squalling guitar propels a full-band tumbledown climax. Even though parts of this ensemble have been playing together for a long time—and any group with White as its center has magic on its side—the telepathy between them is astonishing.
I saw Callahan in London at the outset of this run, in November 2022, and as a veteran fan, it was perhaps my least favorite show of his that I’ve seen. The setlist dwelled largely on his post-pandemic records, as this night in Chicago did, with scant exceptions. I love YTI⅃AƎЯ and Gold Record as much as the next person who loves joy, but why forsake your sweet Smog children! The playing was so digressive—the version of “Coyotes” on Resuscitate! lasts nearly 13 minutes, and many others run to around seven minutes—that I rued what felt like indulgence standing in the way of the old classics.
Yet it doesn’t feel that way on this album, and not simply because Callahan has trimmed the 15-song setlist at Thalia Hall that night to a tidier 10. The quality of the recording captures the glorious tumult in the band’s interplay, making it visceral and elemental: how Laurenzi’s sax shifts from arid to buttery on “Coyotes”; how the rhythm section is held back on “Drover,” as if by the song’s shepherd, then allowed to burst free. In Callahan’s notes, he described Chicago as “America’s heart,” and you can hear this band connecting its ’90s post-rock scene and contemporary jazz tendrils in their playing: “Naked Souls,” a lament about people grown dead inside, becomes a kind of spiritual, Callahan backed by the deep vocals of Pascal Kerong’A, and Natural Information Society’s Joshua Abrams and Lisa Alvarado join for “Natural Information” (surely named in tribute to their verdant jazz group), a puckish incantation that melts into a happy drone and softly nudging horns.
Something else that keeps any potential sprawl in check is the sense that Callahan has had an awakening he fervently needs to transmit, as the name of this record suggests. He has a standup’s sense of timing, and with the combination of a knowing pause and his wise, wry voice, it’s not hard for him to get a laugh out of a little aside like “if I believed in souls—and such—and judgment day” on “Keep Some Steady Friends Around” (the only Smog/pre-2011 song played). On the waltzing “Pigeons,” in which he plays a chauffeur extolling the merits of marriage, he savors and deepens every syllable of “plenipotentiary,” almost as if he’s a little bashful at his enthusiasm, or maybe just doing his best Sam Elliott impression. But often his pauses seem less like someone priming for a laugh than a receiver waiting for the feeling to strike him: “Dreams are thoughts in lo-tus!” he exclaims on “First Bird,” as if the image has just blossomed in his mind’s eye.
Most revivifying are the moments where this man, usually still as a lake, becomes roiled by feeling: “I’m your loverloverloverloverloverloverloverloverloverlover man!” he exalts on “Coyotes,” breathless with ecstasy. On the recorded version of “Partition,” his instruction to “Microdose!/Change your clothes!/Do what you got to do/To see the picture” is a vivid suggestion. But here, it sounds like a racing insurrection against stasis: Callahan at his most cataclysmic, Kinsey stabbing at his fretboard, the band in a sort of junkyard tailspin that even encompasses a brief broken funk interlude. Like all the wildest dreams, you sense they couldn’t recreate this glorious mess if they tried—but its suggestion to venture beyond knowledge, and to trust what you find there, is eye-opening.
