Album Review: Bill Callahan wishes he were an Eagle

Some say that where you gre

The cover of Bill Callahan’s new album

w up will always be a part of you. Bill Callahan grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, just two hours from my hometown. People from Maryland are quirky; my pastor grew up in Baltimore and he enjoys listening to 1970s folk worship music.
I don’t think this sort of geographical theory of interpretation holds water; after all, the cover to Callahan’s newest album, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, is a scene from a golden field in rural Montana with stately pines and wild horses. Silver Spring is the third largest city in Maryland; I don’t think Callahan ever saw wild horses there.
Then again, musical styles are often tied to geographical areas; steel-string lap guitars belong to Nashville, Didgeridoos to Australia, and Brian Wilson to California. So what makes Bill Callahan’s music Marylandish?
The better question is, what makes Bill Callahan so quirky? He started his career making home-made, lo-fi experimental rock music under the band name Smog, and some of his album titles include Woke on a Whaleheart, A River Ain’t Too Much To Love, and Dongs of Sevotion (forgive the pun). Even his latest album’s title, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, seems to use the wrong pronouns and definitely confuses tenses.
On “Rococo Zephyr” Callahan sings: “She lay beside me / like a branch from a tender willow tree / I was as still, as still as a river could be / when a rococo zephyr swept over her and me.”
A rococo zephyr is something Callahan made up. Rococo refers to an elaborately ornate style of architecture prevalent in 18th century Europe; zephyr is the poetic term for a gentle breeze. The two things don’t really fit in the same context, but when combined it sounds like some type of strange and beautiful bird. This is, I think, a good metaphor for Callahan’s music.
Callahan’s voice has a low, deadpan quality that is unnerving against his highly expressive and sentimental musical arrangements. His lyrics are uplifting, symbolic, personal, and morbid, often in the same couplet. His style falls somewhere between Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Leonard Cohen, but there’s clear evidence that Callahan listened to some weird and unearthly music that none of us has ever heard of.
The effect is that Callahan’s music is always a little off from what you think it is, or should be. But given repeated listens, it’s clear that Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, like the elusive rococo zephyr, is a strange and beautiful thing.
So, I don’t think it matters much that Bill Callahan is from Silver Spring, Maryland, but it certainly adds to the myth that makes him and his music so endlessly fascinating. Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle is out now on Drag City Records.