Bill Callahan, “America!”

Yes, something as benign as watching David Letterman from your hotel room in Australia makes you homesick—because Dave’s is a familiar voice, he’s a strong flavor of the culture, and that’s your culture, it’s what you swam in when you were growing up, there’s nothing you can do about it—but then America kind of sucks, too, and makes you angry sometimes and merely annoyed other times. It’s hard to allow the fondness and the critique to remain in tension; it requires nuance and risks others’ misunderstanding. How much easier to write a jingoistic anthem or a one-note political protest.

Reviews that call the song sarcastic get wrong the intention or the humor, I think. But it’s also possible that I am projecting more than usual, because at school I try to hold conflicting things together in this way, too.

The song takes a fun turn at “Everyone’s allowed a past they don’t care to mention”—the personal is political, right? (It has the effect of referring you back to the album’s previous song, on which he sang, “It was me tearing out the baby’s breath.”) Being allowed this past you don’t care to mention implies that everyone has fucked up, but it doesn’t mean they’re unlovable: “Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iran, Native American,” but, still, “I wish I was on the next flight back to America.”

Oh Bill, you’re so mature.

Ant: Held

Bat: Fruite bats

Bear: A man needs a woman or a man to be a man, When you walk

Bee: Rococo zephyr, Short drive, Strayed, Universal applicant, The wheel

Bird: All thoughts are prey to some beast, Blood red bird, From the rivers to the ocean, The hard road, King’s tongue, A man needs a woman or a man to be a man, No dancing, Palimpsest, Too many birds
- Chicken: Running the loping
— Rooster: Blood red bird
- Crow: Blood red bird, Feather by feather
- Dove: Footprints, The wind and the dove
- Eagle: All thoughts are prey to some beast
- Finch: All thoughts are prey to some beast, Rococo zephyr
- Phoenix: Say valley maker
- Raven: Honeymoon child
- Starling: All thoughts are prey to some beast
- Wren: All thoughts are prey to some beast

Bull: Drover

Butterfly: Butterflies drowned in wine

Buffalo: Universal applicant

Cat: Strayed

Cow
- Calf: Universal applicant
- Cattle: Drover

Cricket: Our anniversary

Deer: The well

Dog: Lazy rain, No dancing, Peach pit, Taken, Teenage spaceship, Your sweet entrance
- Puppy: The breeze/my baby cries (Kath Bloom)

Dragon: A man needs a woman or a man to be a man

Fish: When you walk
- Eel: Bathysphere
- Goldfish: Goldfish bowl
- Swordfish: Bathysphere

Flea: Let’s move to the country

Fly
- Curtonevrae fly: Permanent smile

Goat: Let’s move to the country

Horse: Chosen one, I break horses, Red apples, To be of use
- Colt: Let me see the colts, Universal applicant

Lion: Justice aversion, A man needs a woman or a man to be a man

Monkey: Day, Fools lament, Let’s move to the country, When you walk

Mule: Let’s move to the country, Song

Mussel: My shell

Panther: From the rivers to the ocean, Strayed

Pig: Day

Rabbit: The well

Rat: Not lonely anymore

Skunk: Universal applicant

Slug: Confederate bills and pinball slugs

Snake: Hit the ground running, I’m new here
- Anaconda: Real live dress

Spider: A man needs a woman or a man to be a man

Squirrel: Cold blooded old times

Turtle: No dancing

Wasp: Strayed

Weasel: Devotion

Zebra: Justice aversion

leaving Paris a day before Bill Callahan played there last year, or finding out today that Lydia Davis did a reading on my campus last month? She was a mile away from my house while I sat in the dark eating beans out of a can.

On the Bill Callahan beat. New album cover.

Smog, “I’m New Here”

I’ve been thinking about how, as religion recedes from being a mainstream expression of much, we adopt different songs to do the hymn’s job of reminding us of our identity, comforting us, reinforcing our history, emboldening us, getting us through the week. A different Bill song, “Say Valley Maker,” put the idea in my head:

There is no love where there is no obstacle
There is no love where there is no bramble
There is no love on the hacked-away plateau
And there is no love in the unerring
And there is no love on the ‘one true path’

That looks like secular theologizing to me. He describes his vision of how the world works in order to illustrate hopefulness, to build a faith in connectedness.

Today at school someone told a story (seriously, not anecdotally) about passing out drunk and broke in Chicago and having their dad come pick them up and drive them back across the country. It was hopeful. It put legs on an abstract, shifty concept like “love.” Absentmindedly I wrote a line from this song in the margin of my pad: “No matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around.” It is a platitude—until someone helps it happen for you. And I think it names a hope that a lot of people carry, that someone will come over the obstacle and through the bramble to help them turn around. It’s the catcher in the rye or the human lattice in Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, if I may be so teenage with my references, but already I am unpacking song lyrics, so it is too late to apologize for being teenage.

Anyway, it is interesting to think about “pop” songs as doing this work of hymns—putting a handle on what we already believe, or reminding us that love happens in fucked-upness, that hope is worth holding, that we have need for love, that we can’t just talk about it but must perform it for others, too. Pop songs as capsule versions of our values. Though if these songs are what help put a shape on our experience, then suddenly it feels important which songs we put in our repertoire.

“It’s strange, the way you walk behind but seem to lead the way”
(Smog, “Strayed”)

“I feel you are steering this boat. On your back in a sundress with your bare foot on the tiller, yes, but steering nonetheless.”
(Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut, p. 37)

Oh, you suck-up

unrepentant:

Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir; another articulation of this sentiment can be found in the Bill Callahan song, “A Man Needs a Woman or a Man to be a Man”

Bill Callahan (née Smog) is publishing his first novel: Letters to Emma Bowlcut. It is prettily designed and feels serious in your hand like a book of poetry. It reads like poetry, too—prose poetry mixed with perhaps a slow-mouthed comedy routine and some implicit questions about devotion or commitment or one of those.

Here, I typed a page of it.

[Removed by request]

Distinctly recognizable as his voice, yes? I am enjoying it. I hope he writes more.

BUY IT FOR ONLY $12 AT DRAG CITY

Cleaning out closet. Found this setlist from my first Smog show (June 2001) along with my birth certificate and Social Security card in a folder marked “Important Papers.”

You know, there’s a difference between engaging critically with a work—pulling it apart, looking at how it’s structured and what its purpose seems to be, putting questions to it—and taking it as a conversation partner. It’s a difference between dealing with the artwork objectively and subjectively. The subjective conversation is only tangentially related to the work and attains a scope and meaning that is (1) personal to the reader/listener and (2) possibly far away from what the artist had in mind, far away from the “reality” of the artist.

What becomes tricky is that, for some artists, their authorial voice becomes a work, too. The artist’s voice/persona is a work behind all the other works. We see it with… uh… Woody Allen, who has developed a strong public character that is sometimes portrayed in his movies, sometimes captured in interviews, sometimes projected by promotional materials. The person Woody Allen blurs with the character “Woody Allen,” but we have access only to the character and so begin to discuss that character “Woody Allen” in the same way that we would his movies. The character “Woody Allen” is interesting, interesting over against his movies, and the conversation that happens around him is intended affectionately and harmlessly.

Now. I was thinking that if you happen to be Woody Allen or someone who knows Woody Allen, then it must be difficult to remember all this critical theory bullshit. It seems like you’d open a magazine and read some article and feel either really awkward or really annoyed about the way the writer blurred the actual, living person and the authorial persona. Maybe it gets less awkward or annoying once you remember that the article is not a critical commentary on the work itself and certainly not a discussion of the actual creator—but a personal, subjective conversation around a constructed, mythologized artwork, even if the work shares a name with an actual person.

Smog, “Look Now”

A little-known Smog single. It’s a simple song—not many words, not many instruments—but it leaves a mark. The choir of chanting Bills at the end has led many a friend to threaten violence toward me or themselves (they weren’t picky at that point) if I did not turn it off.

“Put your hands to ‘fore it moves through”
As he gets older he keeps writing ‘inspirational’ songs (sycamores, rock bottom risers), and this one from ten years ago flirts with that impulse but is more elliptical, more economical, a song with more give in it.

Bill Callahan, “All Thoughts Are Prey to Some Beast”

How should one act after a break-up? I do not hear the question asked very often; people are nursing their own feelings, or sometimes people are bitter and would just as soon hurt the other person as consider their feelings.

Let’s shoot higher: What is the kindest way to act after a break-up? Or even, How can you act to shorten the other person’s unhappiness?

This song comes at the end of a break-up album. I thought, Isn’t this what you want to hear after a break-up—that your new ex is considering moving out of town, that they are wracked with anxiety or sadness, that they are pacing around chanting “Sweet desires and soft thoughts, return to me” like a crazy person?

It’s easier for one person to move on if the other person seems sad. We want to believe that we were important enough to leave an impression, and if we can keep that sense after a break-up, then we can move on with confidence and self-assurance. If we suspect that we failed to make an impression, however, then we have to ask self-doubting questions about the relationship and ourselves, and the spiral begins.

The it’s-easier-if-they’re-sad theory holds water for me because the messiest break-ups I’ve witnessed occurred when one participant emerged totally unfazed. That’s the shit that drives people nuts and makes them leave a bunch of drunken voicemails and then one night show up at your apartment at 5 a.m. crying and waving some burned, hanging forearm flesh in your face while your neighbors come out to see why the fuck somebody is moaning and banging on your door at 5 a.m. (uh, theoretically).

One tough part is that sometimes you don’t care about them anymore at the point of breaking up, and it’s hard even to fake it. Probably this is a moment at which doing what is theoretically right is more important than doing what feels natural, and expressing sadness is a nice gesture to say, “You mean something to me.” Note that I am not advocating that you fake it too well, lest you begin leading them on, which daytime television hosts, self-help books, and ex-girlfriends agree is harmful. Anyway, why do you have to work so hard to fake your feelings, like some kind of sociopath? Maybe you shouldn’t be dating anyway.

It seems, then, that the kindest way to treat someone with whom you’ve just broken up is to let your actions hint at sadness, yet not in a way that elicits pity (passive aggressive), and not to a degree that leaves them confused about why you broke up in the first place. Such an M.O. may rule out trying to cause jealousy, acting happy about getting away from them, or immediately dating someone else—things we are prone to do because we feel badly, too.

Funniest theory concerning new album is that Bill suggested an abortion and offered to pay for it by saying, “Have one on me!”

(Her idea)

Did you see this, promotional material for Joanna Newsom’s new concept album about abortion?

I saw her play the other night. Some stroke of luck led us to sit eight feet away from her. “Have One on Me,” a song that feels mostly like a formal exercise on the album, became moving when she played and sang it angrily. She played so angrily that I thought she was going to snap the harp in half.

Let’s strip away the personal element for a moment—let’s forget about Joanna or Bill. Isn’t it fascinating that some person saw fit to write and release a triple album that obsessively chronicles the demise of a relationship in detail? Isn’t it fascinating that this cartoon was a piece of official promotional material—is it a taunt, self-flagellation, gallows humor? What does it require emotionally to sing a song like “Baby Birch” on tour, or is writing/recording/touring with the song part of a process by which the writer deals with some real-life event? She seems to care enough to write an emotional song about it but not so much that she cannot sing about it every night for a year and a half on tour.

Is this interesting? The New York Times profile woefully neglected these issues.

There was a Q&A after the show, and my question was, Were you trying to make Bill kill himself with this album? (Of course he is very strong and will live until 2250.) Then I remembered “Go Long” and thought, Okay, lady, maybe you deserve a pass.