Bill Callahan – Gold Record review: A cosy album with a scrappy charm

Callahan made this record after sifting through old notebooks for ‘frozen eggs’ he could turn into new songs

'More and more I am seeing the world as just one big blob of goo that we’re all in' (Hanly Banks Callahan)

“It’s possible,” said Raymond Carver, “to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things – a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring – with immense, even startling power.”

This is an art that the brilliant Bill Callahan has been perfecting since he first began singing his enigmatic stories in the late 1980s. Back then, he lurked behind the name of “Smog”, recorded his lo-fi baritone tales in “dumpster portastudios”, and was so wary of journalists he conducted agonisingly brief, prickly interviews only by fax. Around the year 2000, I saw him play a basement gig billed as “intimate” during which he only delivered two words of onstage patter: “Intimate. Ugh.”

His fans understood. We knew a few facts about a peripatetic childhood, ruled by emotionally remote parents who both worked for the NSA. On his 1995 song, “Bathysphere”, he sang about being seven and asking his mother to lower him beneath the waves to a place “I can’t really feel or dream” before ending the song with his father’s curt rejoinder: “‘But you can’t swim’/ And I’ve never dreamt of the sea again”.

Later there were relationships with fellow indie artists including Cat Power and Joanna Newsom. He handled it all with a deliciously dark, understated wit that always left us wanting more.

But Callahan has been easing into a warmer and more open relationship with the world since dumping the “ugly” pseudonym in 2007, releasing the lush, romantic album Dream River in 2013, wedding filmmaker-turned-therapist Hanly Banks in 2014 and becoming the father to a boy he christened “Bass” shortly afterward. 2019’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest was – by Callahanian standards – overflowing with gratitude to his “lovely wife”. Having realised that “honesty is the most interesting thing”, he let references to Sesame Street rustle up against more meditations on mortality prompted by the death of his mother: a woman he says remains a mystery to him.

‘Gold Record’ album artwork (Drag City)

It’s a surprise to get another album so quickly from a man who weighs his words so carefully. Turns out that Callahan was unwilling to leave his family to tour, so he began poking around in old notebooks for “frozen eggs” he could turn into new songs.

The results are mostly wonderful. Songs such as “Cowboy”, on which Callahan sings soporifically of a simple life that only requires “whisky, water, tortillas and beans”, give a sense of him looking back indulgently at a younger version of himself. His voice remains steady and patient against a sleepy hoof-swaying guitar, whistle and spaghetti western trumpet.

I wondered if a song called “35” was begun when he was that age. “I can’t see myself in the books I read these days/ Used to be I saw myself on every single page...” But I suspect it’s the older songwriter who gave a supportive warmth to the easy melody and new lines: “Tired eyes wander/ Into their own sight/ Leaving a body unscripted/ And forced to improvise...”

“Pigeons” casts him as an old limo driver, taking a pair of well-matched newlyweds to their boutique hotel. When they notice his wedding ring and ask for advice he tells them: “When you are dating, you only see each other/ And the rest of us can go to hell/ But when you are married, you’re married to the whole wide world/ The rich, the poor/ The sick and the well/ The straights, and the gays/ And the people who say we don’t use these terms these days...” He’s aware it might come off “preachy as hell” but it’s a big shift from 1995, when Callahan was snarling “I’m gonna get so drunk at your wedding”.

Carver described marriage as “emotional reservoirs” that writers could draw on repeatedly. Its not a subject that gets much consideration in popular song, but Callahan is continuing to find easeful inspiration in his contentment, while acknowledging the problems. So “Breakfast” deals with cooking, washing up and the confession “I drink so that we don’t fight/ She don’t drink so that we don’t fight…” And “Another Song” paints a picture of a creative couple lying in bed “wanting for nothing... except another song”.

One of Callahan’s eggs hatches less successfully. “Protest Song” is a jerkily written joke about protest songs that you only need to hear once. But for the most part Gold Record is a deftly woven and cosily feathered little nest of songs. Settle in.