Bill Callahan: I want to be alone

Alt-country's reluctant star, Bill Callahan, aka Smog, is not a man to stand still. Or get too close to people. Or talk much. Andy Gill rises to the challenge

Bill Callahan, better known as Smog, has elected to fulfil most of the promotional duties for his new album Rain On Lens by e-mail. As he struggles to convey his thoughts by telephone from Australia, it becomes obvious why: each answer is a chain of hesitations, false starts, long pauses and incomplete clauses, with phrases left dangling in the ether, unconsummated: "It's like... When you... Perhaps I..."

It's like pulling teeth, blindfolded. Any question successfully negotiated feels like a triumph of the interviewer's art, though Callahan himself seems no more satisfied with his eventual responses: there's a palpable lack of commitment in his voice that transmits clearly across thousands of miles. Perhaps that's only to be expected from a writer whose songs skirt round the scruffier edges of experience, shady of motive and barbed of insight, and whose own renditions are often painfully halting realisations of unpalatable truths.

Not that they necessarily refer to Callahan himself, of course. Asked to what degree his songs are autobiographical, he answers, "Umm... like, zero degrees." So none of the things in his songs ever happened?

"I think everything's happening at once," he contends. "It's like nothing is true for longer than a few seconds. But I try to keep myself out of it as much as possible. Like, there's that country-rock singer Melissa Etheridge, the lesbian who just broke up with her girlfriend, and I saw an ad for her new record and tour which said, 'Live... and Alone'. It seems kind of cheap to draw sympathy for your personal life. There should be something more universal." Yet sometimes, the English language lacks the words to adequately convey the universal – hence Callahan's employment of neologisms such as "flubby", "glutty" and "snaining" to bridge the gaps between experience and expression.

As a child, Callahan spent a couple of years on a US army base in Yorkshire, albeit mostly in the company of other American kids. "It wasn't a really big English experience," he acknowledges, though the peripatetic life of an army brat clearly left its mark on him.

"It gets you in the habit of moving around a lot," he says. "I just get bored if I spend too long in one place. I don't even like to wake up in the same apartment for too long." And like many an army child, he seems intensely private and solitary. Despite his claim of "zero degree" autobiographical input, songs such as "Keep Some Steady Friends Around" and "Live As If Someone Is Watching You" clearly express principles close to his heart – in the case of the latter, proposing a sort of therapeutic solipsism.

"It's about the inner feeling of having a double consciousness," he explains. "You can never do something without thinking about it – there's always the action, and then something inside watching, analysing what you just did. It's as if you're your own society, you're being judged by the society within yourself. It's supposed to be kinda funny, too, like the typical marriage cliché of the wife keeping the husband in line. If you live alone, you tend not to bathe or clean up the house – you need someone to watch you, either inside yourself or a real person." Growing too close to other people, however, can be perilous for one's personality. "If you hang around people too much," he reckons, "you lose yourself."

It's hardly surprising, then, that he denies any sense of fellowship with peer artists. Though he admits to a taste for the more inscrutable works of Scott Walker, Callahan's main musical influences are classic rock, punk and John Lee Hooker, whose stripped-down, hypnotic pulses are echoed in many a Smog song.

Despite the film reference in the album title, Callahan has no personal experience of the movie-making process, though he acknowledges a taste for the films of Scorsese, Nicolas Roeg and Takeshi Kitano, and a particular affection for the comedies of Buster Keaton. There's something of Keaton's deadpan humour in some Smog songs, and it surfaces now and again throughout the interview, too. When asked what kind of an audience he writes for, he replies dryly, "I haven't narrowed my audience down beyond humans"; and surely there was humorous intent behind the announcement that while recording Rain on Lens, the musicians had to keep to a strict diet of sushi and Buddhist vegan food, and that the original drummer had been fired for smuggling in a hot dog?

"No, that was real," says Callahan. "You've got to be in peak form when you work, you can't have too many animal fats, they make you lethargic and aggressive." It's impossible to tell whether he's joking.

The album 'Rain on Lens' is out now on Domino