Bill Callahan – Gold Record
Drag City – 4 September 2020
Bill Callahan Gold Record (Drag City)
Where last year’s outstanding and sprawling Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest was a seemingly up close and a personal set of songs built around some significant changes in Bill Callahan‘s own life, Gold Record sees the master songwriter look up and out to craft a set of ten short stories or vignettes.
Like on Shepherd, Gold Record sees Bill Callahan centre the songs around a tune from his nylon-string Martin guitar, bought around the time of A River Ain’t too much to Love, when his sound began to noticeably change. Gold Record‘s first or second take recordings (unlike the loosely linked Shepherd or Dream River, it is to be considered a set of singles) share the easy approach to music-making heard on Shepherd and albums like A River. Bill’s main man Matt Kinsey is again integral, with his intuitive guitar playing adding light and shade to each piece. The odd streak of trumpet or horn is like a dash of colour across a couple of songs, but this album is careful to keep instrumentation to a minimum, with spare bass and drums holding things down.
Stood salient in front of the light and dreamy instrumentation is Bill’s baritone, here closer and lower than ever and able to easily express devilishly funny comedy, like with opening line ‘…The pigeons ate the wedding rice and exploded somewhere over San Anton…io‘ (Pigeons). There is also tenderness running through the set, probably most notably on the lovely but spooky Mackenzies, which sees a vulnerable narrator unable to start his car and finding himself invited into his neighbours’ house at ‘beer thirty‘ to ‘join the family‘.
Heartbreakingly, the family is just a duo, with a place still laid and a room still ready for a dead son, whose shoes our narrator slips into, wishing that Mr Mackenzie ‘would call me son again‘. After peering out through the window into his own sunlit house, the narrator sleeps and wakes in the dark to two figures stood in the doorway saying ‘son, it’s okay, we’re okay…‘ All through this the progressing drums suggest unease, but Bill’s voice stays soft and gentle, giving the song a heartfelt but distinctly disturbed and somewhat Lynchian vibe. It is a powerhouse of lyrical complexity that leaves you bamboozled, confused and awestruck.
At the other end of the emotional scale are a couple of great little lightweight comedy numbers, Protest Song and Ry Cooder. The former sees a grumpy television watcher put out by a disingenuous singer: ‘Somebody must stop these boys, messing with a man’s toys, step aside son, you’re gonna get hurt!‘ Set to a menacing guitar tune, with Kinsey adding high notes and fret slides, it’s ace fun, as is Ry Cooder, a tribute piece as good as my favourite line from Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest: ‘I signed Willie’s guitar… When he wasn’t looking’ (What Comes After Certainty). With ironically stuttering guitars, Bill declares that ‘straight shooter‘ and ‘straight spiner‘ Cooder ‘freed Cuba, with a Buena Vista‘. The whole thing is completely silly and a total hoot, but both also demonstrate the dexterity of Callahan’s voice, something that we all knew, but also something that has never been clearer than on this release.
Elsewhere is Breakfast, a bittersweet little song quietly portraying the ups and downs of marriage with on-the-nose writing and deep bass and electric guitar mixing with a lightly strummed nylon string guitar line. ‘I drink so that we don’t fight‘, our narrator admits. ‘She don’t drink so that we don’t fight‘. ‘She still loves me, you see’, he brightly states, before adding that ‘she’s been leaving, like a suntan, ever since this sunset began‘. It is beautiful stuff, as is everything on this splendid set, which, by the time the abstracted and ambiguous ticket inspector of As I Wander has pondered worldly while perhaps travelling along the confines of the tracks, has delivered an abundance of emotions through the windows of people’s lives. Patient, pensive and meditative, as well as witty, ironic and razor-sharp, these fully realised sketches are Callahan at the top of his game. Oh, how I love this album.
Watch Bill Callahan’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert (with Matt Kinsey: guitar; Derek Phelps: trumpet) featuring three tracks from Gold Record – Pigeons/Another Song and The Mackenzies as well as a Release, a track from Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest.
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Photo Credit: Hanly Banks Callahan