Callahan provides 10 narrations here that mostly look at other people, but they should help both him and us look inward, too.

What sort of Shepherd could coax this mad zoo?

[xrr rating=2.75/5]Admittedly, the audience for Bill Callahan’s Have Fun with God is, by definition, quite limited. Callahan’s latest LP Dream River, released last year, was a mini-masterpiece, a minimalistic meditation on love, lust, loss and mortality. Have Fun with God is a “dub” remix of Dream River in its entirety. Callahan and mixer Brian Beattie have fun with the source …

[xrr rating=3.5/5]Bill Callahan put his Smog moniker in mothballs after 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love. That was eight years and five albums ago. His work over that span has shown a restlessness and daring musicality that points in previously unexplored directions. The results are at times jaunty and boisterous, especially next to back numbers like “To Be …

Bill Callahan Apocalypse Rating: 3.7/5.0 Label: Drag City In many ways, Apocalypse sounds like a typical Bill Callahan album. All of the musician’s post lo-fi primary traits are there, just like they’ve been on Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, A River Ain’t Too Much To Love and others: the slow, deliberate baritone; the meticulous, carefully constructed arrangements; a …

It’s pretty easy to quickly say “hell yeah” when you’re offered the opportunity to interview Bill Callahan. Keeping the number of questions to a humane level is more difficult, as Callahan’s back catalog is loaded with songs and stories that invite conversation. The song list that comprises part of this interview was severely whittled down; if I had no shame …

Letters to Emma Bowlcut by Bill Callahan Rating: 3.0/5.0 Publisher: Drag City Letters to Emma Bowlcut is one of the few works of musician-penned fiction that is not appallingly abysmal or vainly self-indulgent. There’s a stigma attached to works of “literature” penned by a lyricist, and with good reason. Even heavyweights like Bob Dylan and Nick Cave haven’t dodged this …

Bill Callahan Rough Travel for a Rare Thing Rating: 4.0/5.0 Label: Drag City No one listens to a Bill Callahan album expecting to be cheered up. The singer’s best songs carry with them a sense of desolation and loneliness that is impossible to miss, even if these dark overtones are sometimes offset with dry humor, a resigned shrug or hints …

Like the presumed eagle Bill Callahan wishes we could become (based on the title of his latest album) somehow this musician managed to elude my musical net and soar unnoticed for far too many years. There is something baroque about Sometimes a Wish We Were an Eagle, something beguiling about its plaintive minimalism. Tagged as paean to a broken relationship …

Bill Callahan Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle Rating: 4.5 Label: Drag City It’s tempting to view Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle as just another entry in that long line of breakup albums, with Bill Callahan sorting through the wreckage of his split from pixie harpist Joanna Newsom. Amid all the horse/river/bird imagery that recurs throughout the …