"It's Time to put God Away."

Bill Callahan - Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle

(Drag City: 2009)

Bill Callahan is one of my favourite artists.  It actually doesn't really matter what song he is singing, I could literally just sit and listen to him.  He's got this huge, rich baritone voice that reeks of authority and emanates a simple, pure beauty with every word.  And the lyrics he writes are amazingly introspective and probing.  I can only liken it to what it might feel like to be friends with your grandfather: him telling you stories and aphorisms of an older age for a new breed.  Does that even make sense?  You might know him as Smog or (Smog) - this is technically only his second album under his own name - but you cannot confuse the voice or music.  Altogether I think this is his thirteenth or fourteenth album (including his work as both Smog and (Smog) ).

One could try to define his evolution in 3 loose stages: early lo-fi stuff; middle interest in noises; and finally a polished but sparse reincarnation of intimate, essentially lo-fi stuff.  Obviously, others may use different categories but for me, those three work fine.  I am most interested in the initial and final phases because that's 

where my own interests primarily lie.  On this album, as on his other recent releases, you will hear his acoustic accompanied by beautiful string arrangements (along with other basic instruments).  Beautifully simple/simply beautiful.

The somewhat enigmatic "Jim Cain" is the album's opener.  Jim Cain was a 20th century American author (Double Indemnity; The Postman Always Rings Twice) whose dream it was, according to internet searches, to become a singer.  It didn't pan out because "his voice wasn't good enough."  Now, I have no real idea who Jim Cain was and I don't necessarily care; I haven't read his novels nor do I wish to see any of the films inspired by his works.  Yet, I find it amusing he would choose this particular novelist's name as the title because voice is one of the things that people who don't care for Callahan always mention.  "It's too melancholy," "It's too sad," "Too deep," "He's not really singing," etc, etc...  Maybe he's playing tricks with us, maybe it's a coincidence - who knows for sure.  But the thing that gets me is that this may be perhaps the best opening song on any of his albums (and there are quite a few opening gems: "Palimpsest;" "Justice Aversion;" 

"Diamond Dancer" to name a couple).  "I started out in search of/Ordinary things.  How much a tree/Bends in the wind.  I started telling the story/Without knowing the end," is a great way to open the song.  Aren't we all searching for something ordinary?  Aren't we all telling a story without knowing where, how it ends?  I suppose if you do have it all planned out chances are we are not friends.  The ending resonates with equal intensity, at least for me:  "In case things go poorly/And I not return/Remember the good things I've done/Done me in."  The opening track is an invitation to us, but also, it seems, a warning.  We must remember the good things that we love about Callahan.  

The next track, "Eid Ma Clack Shaw," starts out with a frail statement: Callahan is reliving a ghost from the past.  It's an impossible thing, to "shake a memory."  This song trots along like the steady gait of the pony that Callahan has been prone to use.  When you read between the lines, the generally upbeat mask of this song is actually quite a brilliant disguise for what is probably a source of great sadness for the author.  The memory of a loved one is dreamt about. Upon waking, he realizes it's just a dream: that, "love is the king of the beasts/and when it gets hungry it must kill to eat."  So "ripped by reality" he falls back asleep and dreams the perfect song.  While love is cruel and causes suffering, it might be argued that that suffering is the source of great creativity (in this case The Perfect Song).  The use of gibberish is also clever in that it can be hard to remember our dreams - almost infuriatingly so - and even harder to write them down legibly.

"The Wind and the Dove" is a very nice song.  It opens with some spooky, mystical sounding instruments at the outset - I think they're Indian instruments - I can't be sure what they are.  What I get from this song is that it's primarily about fate and circumstance.  I read somewhere that a lot of this record is about debunking myths that we have; spectacular things that we attribute to unnatural causes but which are simply acts of 

nature.  I think that explanation is a great one, especially for this song.

"Rococo Zephyr" is a beautiful song, full of love and elaboration.  From my limited word knowledge, the title essentially means a gentle yet intricate breeze.  If that's what it really means then it makes a lot of sense, for in this song Callahan is a river and in this song he is trying to personalize the river and how it might feel during a breeze.  Going along with the above explanation he gives for these songs, it fits perfectly:  "Maybe this is all, is all that meant to be."  Sometimes a breeze is simply that.

I suppose that "Too Many Birds" is a song above my level but to me it combines the bad luck of someone who loves a place so much they can't help but come back to it again and again, only to have it get more crowded each day.  I might even say it's like the earth in many ways, i.e. overpopulation.  I also had this other thought that each bird was an individual thought and the tree was a brain, like in the song "All Thoughts Are Prey to Some Beast."  Sometimes we have too many thoughts and when that happens we always lose a 

thought or two in the process.  They go out to sleep on a stone only to come back to check if there's more space the next day.

"My Friend" is a great song but probably not really for me. Maybe the "heaviest" song on the album thus far.  

"All Thoughts Are Prey to Some Beast" is an ambitious and sobering song, to say the least.  There isn't much one can say about this song except:  "please listen to this song!"  It conjures up so many powerful images and moments in time for me - very disturbing if you think about it.  The persistent rakes of the strings, the stuttering weapon the drums become, the urgency in his voice - all combine for a beautiful nightmare.

"Invocation of Ratiocination" is nothing to write home about but it does continue the creepiness factor.  Alternate name for this track: "Common Sense."

"Faith/Void" is a delicious and thought-provoking bookend to an incredible album.  From the opening lines of Jim Cain, "I started out in search of ordinary things" to the lines of Faith/Void, "It's time to put God away...this is the end of faith, no more must I strive to find my peace, to find my peace in a lie."  It's a long 9+ minutes but Callahan's style and the way he layered this tune makes it work, and the nearly ten minutes is over before you know it.

Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle is a pretty solid record.  It is definitely a private record, to be listened to away from the hustle of city streets and loud noises.  Maybe it's an "at the cottage record"?  I don't have a cottage though, so I will listen to it through headphones and cigarette smoke.

Callahan, despite gaining criticism for his vocal style, is still a top-notch performer who will probably only get better with age - I mean he's fairly old already, turning 45 in June of this year, but more than that I wonder if he continues with this trend of writing as he gets older.

Either way, if you haven't listened to Callahan or this record, take the time to do so and you will not be disappointed.  Also you can check out Callahan's newest offering, Apocalypse, released last month on 

maybe the greatest label of all time, Drag City.