On his latest solo record, the singer-songwriter continues his quiet excavation of self and the tumultuous world around him, exploring how a supposedly ordinary life is often anything but.
Aman goes to the driveway to try and start his car. The engine keeps turning over but it won’t catch. An older man runs out from across the street and tells the younger one that cranking it more will only make things worse. He invites the younger man in for a beer, which turns into dinner with the older man and his wife. Despite living across the street from each other, the two men had never met, the younger one being “the type of guy who sees a neighbor outside/And stays inside to hide.” After dinner, the older man’s wife shows the younger man a room to rest, which, judging by the pictures on the wall and the things arranged just so, belonged to the couple’s now-dead son. The young man peers through the blinds and remembers that his own children will be home soon. Where had he been going? We never find out. The young man falls asleep and wakes up in the dark to the older couple standing in the doorway. “Son, it’s OK,” they say. “It’s OK. Son. We’re OK. We’re OK.”
Like a lot of Bill Callahan songs, especially the ones he started writing around the time of his 2005 album A River Ain’t Too Much to Love under his old performing name, Smog, “The Mackenzies,” from Gold Record, handles concrete events with the texture and ambiguity of dreams. Callahan’s voice is low—lower every album, it feels like—and his arrangements, while thoughtful and quietly surprising, are almost always anchored by a lone acoustic guitar. Listen at a distance and you might just hear another man in chambray doing his earnest American thing. But listen closer—the funny asides, the way the narratives ramble and unfold like a new idea explored in real time—and you can hear someone exploring how a supposedly ordinary life is often anything but.
His last album, 2019’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, focused on marriage and parenthood. As the father of two boys under five, I’d never heard music that better captured the wonder and trials of domestic life from a man’s perspective—a comfort, especially, at a time when the culture was investigating what, exactly, made a good man in the first place. In the past, his characters’ attitudes toward women and children had been coyly misanthropic: They fantasized about kidnapping kids from the grocery store, made blowup dolls out of their ex-girlfriend’s clothes, and found their moral vocation in cunnilingus. One song, 1999’s “Let’s Move to the Country,” teased commitment, ending on the line, “Let’s start a… / Let’s have a…,” but left off the words—“family,” “baby”—the man couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say.
If Shepherd’s men were settling down, Gold Record imagines the sweet old codgers they may one day become. They chauffeur two newlyweds through the desert and feel stupid for giving the couple advice, even though they asked (“Pigeons”); he grumbles at the pop singer comforting his audience with hollow bromides (“Protest Song”) and reconciles himself to marriage with a woman who hates watching him eat but hates seeing him go hungry, too (“Breakfast”). Reality has borne down on him, but he remains available to wonder: for art (“Another Song,” “As I Wander”), for the babies “with eyes like honey-drunk bees,” for the ways “the moon can make a false love feel true” (“35”). And as though to close the existential loop opened 21 years earlier, he revisits “Let’s Move to the Country,” filling in the words—“family,” “baby”—he’d left off before. In 1999, the song played like the daydream of nervous young lovers getting ahead of themselves; on Gold Record, it plays like nostalgia: Remember when we had plans? Yeah. That was good.
For all its masculine cosplay, the heart of Gold Record is spontaneous, intuitive and feminine, a flock of little dreams loose in the Milky Way. You never sense him straining to make a point or steer the story. If anything, Callahan often seems like he’s following his songs instead of leading them, carefully and open to all paths, the way a birder follows the call from wherever it comes. (He is a meditator, no surprise.) Even ”Ry Cooder,” a tribute to the roots-rock musician and possibly the dumbest song Callahan has written in 27 years, is alive with punchlines, zig-zags, and little surprises a stricter sort of attention would miss. Like all supposedly simple men, Callahan makes a show of putting one foot steadily in front of the other. Then, suddenly, he leaps.
The advice to the newlyweds in “Pigeons,” by the way, is this:
When you are dating, you only see each otherAnd the rest of us can go to hellBut when you are married, you are married to the whole wide worldThe rich, the poorThe sick and the wellThe straights and gaysAnd the people that say, ‘We don’t use those terms these days.’
Callahan is in his mid-50s now, and has been making records for more than half his life. Listening to them in sequence, you can hear a songwriter moving slowly from skepticism and alienation toward gratitude and warmth. Like a lot of artists on Drag City—a label Callahan has now been on for almost 30 years, longer than any other artist on their roster—Callahan comes to his folk music from a place both post-punk and post-hippie, with the individualism and reticence of the former and the utopian intimacy of the latter. He is cranky, but generous, the kind of performer who brings you inside a secret, and who, even in jest, seems to treat his circumstances as a gift.
In a bit of poetic consonance, Callahan became a father just a few years before losing his mother to cancer: The child becomes the parent, the parent moves on to make room for the new child. “I didn’t ever feel like she was being honest or expressing her feelings my whole life,” he said in an interview with Pitchfork in 2019. “As she was getting older, I begged her: Show your children who you are, because we want to know before you die. She couldn’t do it.” It’s a stark quote, harsh and soft at the same time. But in its wholeness, there’s a truth. Gold Record captures both sides: The yen to collapse the spaces between people, and the acknowledgment that some spaces are too cold to cross.
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