Smog - A Life in the Bathyscaphe

Smog, aka Bill Callahan, emerged from within the American "lo-fi" movement, the one that includes the likes of Pavement, Beck, Sebadoh. But it would be far too reductive to confine his music to the fleeting core of these new rock trends. His songs, in fact, possess that flavor of immortality typical of classics like Nick Drake, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave. They are sonic miniatures, minimalist watercolors that explore the darkest recesses of the mind, solitude, anguish, alienation, built around a musical framework as sober as it is original. What most surprises the listener are above all the constant shifts in rhythm, the counterpoints, the austere settings and the nervy guitar figures, which coil around vibrations worthy of Television, as well as the litanies that Smog intones in a listless, decadent register. In some ways, Smog is truly the Drake of the Nineties, especially for his ability to translate existential unease onto the page with a sensitivity that is at once moving and restrained.

Born in 1966 in New Hampshire, but raised in Maryland and England, Bill Callahan recounts that he began experimenting with music as a child battling insomnia by listening to a transistor radio: "I used to have fun playing with the tuning dial, disrupting the sound of songs with static noise," he recalls. He received his musical education in Georgia, but it was in California that he began his artistic career, with a series of self-produced cassettes ("Macrame` Gunplay" from 1988, "Cow" from 1989, "A Table Setting" from 1990, "Tired Tape Machine" from 1990). "I took the stage name," says Callahan, "from a Jello Biafra interview. He said that 'smog' is the flavor of 'jello'. I chose a pseudonym because it stays open to every possible option (I can record as a solo artist or as a band), and because if you record under your own name, audiences assume that you are the 'I' of your songs, that you're singing about yourself, that you're the sole protagonist."

His debut album, Sewn To The Sky, came out in 1990, at the height of America's "lo-fi" craze, the musical trend favoring dirty, low-fidelity sound. Smog didn't shy away from these conventions, adding his own spin, mixing dissonance, ramshackle chants and off-kilter rhythms ("Kings Tongue", "Fruit Bats", "Puritan Work Ethic", "Polio Shimmy"), leaving only tracks like "Peach Pit" and "A Jar Of Sand" to carry the record's most human moments, the ones where his depressive mood as a lonely, nonconformist heart shows through in all its desolation.

Still rigorously avoiding the spotlight, Smog was signed by Drag City, one of the most respected independent labels in the United States, for which he recorded the EP Floating, followed by the album Forgotten Foundation. It's a complex record, in which more "conventional" harmonies ("Burning Kingdom", "Your Dress") and classic-flavored folk ballads ("Head Of Stone II", "Bad Ideas For Country Songs", "Bad Investment") sit alongside his sonic eccentricities, from the solo-guitar accompaniment of "Filament" to the a cappella howl of "Guitar Innovator". There are also instrumentals which, from the garage-rock of "Do The Bed" to the energetic "Dead River", carry forward his psychological introspection in a vein of the fiercest intimacy.

Less fragmented and musically richer (also thanks to Kim Osterwalder's cello), Julius Cesar (1993) marks another turning point in Smog's career. The raw, "lo-fi" rock of his early work gives way to a new taste for orchestration, to which the American singer-songwriter adds his characteristic spectral, decadent touch. The sonic spectrum is much broader: from the country-western of "37 Push-Ups" to the lysergic serenade of "What Kind Of Angel", from the pompous "Your Wedding" to the languid "Strawberry Rash", which echoes "Heroin" by the Velvet Underground, all the way to the rediscovered energy of "I Am A Star Wars", over which hovers the riff of "Brown Sugar" by the Rolling Stones. Poised between Television-style neurotic rock and the decadent spleen of singer-songwriters like Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen, Smog perfects what has by now become his signature sound, also confirmed by the mini-CD Burning Kingdom: another plunge into his unsettling, claustrophobic atmospheres, culminating in the trance of "My Shell", in the desolation of "Drunk On The Stars", wrapped in the most spectral atmospheres of Nico, and in the sinister cadences of the single "My Family".

Callahan is by now a complete musician, capable of updating classic singer-songwriter craft with the sharpest insights of post-punk movements such as new wave, dark-rock, lo-fi and post-rock. Backing him up is none other than a guru of the American "indie" scene, Jim O'Rourke. In 1995 he thus arrives at his masterpiece: Wild Love. The raw, "lo-fi" rock of his early days has fused with a distinctive taste for orchestration, giving rise to a broad and eccentric sonic spectrum. The cello (played by O'Rourke) and the keyboards, in particular, add a sinister touch to Smog's panels of everyday desolation, in a hypnotic blend of chamber music and indie-rock.

The opening is an instant gut-punch, with the pulsating "Bathysphere", built on a dark rhythm and a neurotic, vibrating guitar, poised somewhere between "Marquee Moon" by Television and "One Hundred Years" by the Cure. The lyrics are one of Smog's typical desperate soliloquies, with the protagonist dreaming of living inside an underwater diving bell on the ocean floor, but "he can't swim" and his father will kill the dream. It's almost a parable of the agoraphobia that afflicts Callahan, of his inability to connect with a world he doesn't feel part of. The intensity doesn't let up through the 80 seconds of "Wild Love", a brief interlude steeped in a spare cello melody over which Smog intones his act of grief. The mood turns even more sinister on the following "Sweet Smog Children", with an unsettling music-box melody, minimalist keyboard figures and faint background noise; the ideal backdrop for some of the album's most sorrowful, dreamlike lyrics (“Sweet Smog children/ I just want to touch you/ like the invisible man/ to be untouchable/ like only a child can”). Increasingly lost in the void of his existential malaise, Smog raises to the sky the solemn hymn of "The Emperor" with the solitary pride of a hermit.

If three simple piano chords are enough to give shape to the melody of "Limited Capacity", with the unsettling "It's Rough" Callahan also proves he can build complex arrangements, elegantly blending the funereal drones of a string section, the interweaving of three guitars in dialogue with one another, and the energy of a drum machine. The anemic bard of sadness manages to regain some vigor, if only briefly, in the neurotic rockabilly of "Sleepy Joe", where the "sleep" in question belongs to a guinea pig in a hibernation experiment. But it's two bona fide ballads that bring the listener back onto the dark path of melancholy: the fragile "The Candle", backed by faint guitars and droning keyboards, and the fatalistic "Be Hit", steeped in bitterly sardonic humor.

It serves as the prelude to the album's masterpiece: the orchestral apotheosis of "Prince Alone in the Studio", a sublime showcase of Smog's compositional skill at the crossroads of pop, rock and chamber music. The mood is majestically decadent, with melodramatic strings coiling sinuously around the guitars, pushed to excess as ever, in a long symphonic crescendo made all the more feverish by the pomp of the percussion. Dramatic sonics, then, offset by a lyric that's ironically "nonsense", in which Prince (yes, that Prince, the musician from Minneapolis) prefers a solo guitar session to the company of girls who want to have sex with him (“it’s four a.m./ and he finally gets that guitar track right/ and it’s better than anything any girl could ever give him/ because Prince is alone”).

The album closes on the notes of the nursery rhyme "Goldfish Bowl", its tight arrangement acting as a counterpoint to a slender melodic frame.

The following EP Kicking A Couple Around revisits the rougher sounds of the past and doesn't add much to his repertoire. The album The Doctor Came At Dawn, on the other hand, shows a greater focus on the voice-and-guitar ballad format ("Somewhere In The Night", "Everything You Touch", "Whistling Teapot"), but concentrates its most dramatic moments elsewhere, as in the languid "You Moved In", the solemn "All Your Woman Things", or the a cappella blues of "Hangman Blues".

Smog's musical formula is further refined on Red Apple Falls, the 1997 album, which still offers precious songs like "Red Apples", a piano romance over which Callahan's funereal litany hovers, "I Was A Stranger", balanced between a classical-sounding piano and an unusual Hawaiian-guitar theme, or the stirring "Blood Red Bird". But Smog, perhaps sensing the risk of repetitiveness lurking nearby, unveils a surprising record in Knock Knock (1999). Callahan's funereal songs take on the tones of genuine chamber-rock this time around: "Let's Move To The Country" reworks the motif of "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson with a string orchestration, "No Dancing", sung in a decadent register worthy of David Bowie, coils around a hard-rock riff, and the six minutes of "River Guard" offer a sorrowful, introspective reflection set to the beat of a slightly out-of-tune piano, with echoes of Neil Young and Tom Waits. The theme of existential malaise remains dominant, expressed by Smog through fatalistic stories steeped in a depressed, listless mood.

Aided by prestigious collaborators such as John McEntire and Jeff Parker of Tortoise, on Dongs Of Sevotion (2000) Callahan opts for a softer, more "soul"-inflected songwriting style. It's an approach that doesn't always come off, but which can still deliver moments of real emotion, as in the ironic "Dress Sexy At My Funeral", with its dark spoken-word delivery à la Lou Reed, or in the intense "Permanent Smile". Either way, even on this record Smog proves he has by now firmly mastered his own dramatic style, one capable of combining the rough sonics of rock with austere classical orchestration.

Rain On Lens (2001), by contrast, is something of a misstep. Despite some notable collaborations (Rick Rizzo of Eleventh Dream Day and Maples guitarist Pat Samson), the record doesn't have much special to offer beyond a peculiar fondness for the more cerebral atmospheres of post-rock. The opening title track keeps the tension high, but aside perhaps from the poignant "Live As If Someone Is Always Watching You", the rest of the album comes across as monotone, trapped within the same "depressive" clichés that Smog himself had helped create.

Smog is a curious character. Shy and introverted, he claims his favorite philosophers are "Brother Theodore, Ethan Buckler and de Sade", that he loves the film "Being John Malkovich", that if there's one US state he would never move to it's Pennsylvania, and that among his dreams is a trip to Iran. It's a shame that his notorious reluctance toward any form of self-promotion, promotional tours included, has pretty much kept him from being discovered by European audiences.

Smog's eleventh album, Supper (2003), rests on a combination of soft guitars, female vocals (the excellent Sarabeth Tucek), seductive melodies and sentimental odes. Where Dongs of Sevotion (2000) had been an attempt to beef up Smog's traditional "no-fi folk" with fuller arrangements and more polished studio production, "Supper" instead marks a return to the stripped-down sound of his early records, despite the presence of Tortoise's John McEntire and a few flashes of electric rock. Compared to previous work, however, the sound grows warmer and more harmonious, almost as if offering some consolation from the anguish pervading the songs.

The album starts strong, with its most rock-oriented tracks, before gradually sliding into more subdued tones. The opening track, "Feather By Feather", is a Neil Young-style alt-country ballad, whispered by Smog in a fatalistic tone, with twangy guitar accompaniment and a female voice. The pace picks up with "Butterflies Drowned in Wine", a Lou Reed-style glam-boogie (shades of "Sweet Jane"?) enriched by Jim White's "tribal" percussion, and with "Morality", a dirty Stones-style blues held up by intermittent guitars and dry, powerful drumming. "Ambition" is taut, spasmodic rock in the Television mold. "Vessel In Vain" has an old-fashioned flavor, recalling early Leonard Cohen. "Truth Serum" is a sweet elegy whispered as a duet, somewhere between the most tormented Neil Young and the most intimate Van Morrison. "Our Anniversary" is a tiny minimalist gem, built on a single guitar chord held indefinitely, with Smog's baritone voice declaiming the lyrics in a calm, reflective register. The gradual descent into lower, more sorrowful tones culminates in "Driving", a long psychedelic mantra (with the line "and the rain washes the price off of our windshield" repeated endlessly) accompanied by subtle guitars and a ghostly female chorus, fading into a chaos of Eastern-tinged sounds. The album closes with the spiritual invocation of "A Guiding Light", a beautiful slow number whose effect brings a thread of hope into so much desolation.

But don't go looking for rays of sunshine or bursts of euphoria in Smog's music. After all, it would be absurd to expect them from someone who wrote a song like "Dress Sexy at My Funeral"... (on Dongs of Sevotion). Across the nine tracks of Supper, Callahan's "lo-fi" minimalism seems to have reached its sublimation in the form of a reflective, disenchanted ballad style. What's missing, perhaps, is the despair and the heart-wrenching songs of Wild Love. The drama of his early work has now softened into a composed, fatalistic style, a mature and profound brand of songwriting that loses none of its charm.

2005 brings A River Ain't Too Much Love. Ten sepia-toned snapshots, yellowed in the memory of a mythical America, close kin to the one portrayed by the "Southern" pens of William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. When the alchemy works, it's spine-tingling. Just take the opener, with the chilling folk-blues of "Palimpsest". White's brushed drums (Dirty Three) trace the horizon of these bucolic hallucinations. And when the drumming picks up steam, unexpected rock jolts burst through (the coda of the ballad "Say Valley Maker", the more agitated passages of "The Well", the tense rhythmic spirals of "Let Me See The Colts"). The emotional climax of the record, though, comes in the waltz of "Rock Bottom Riser", a Cohen-style redemption song (or in the manner of latter-day Cave), in which Callahan's spare fingerpicking caresses an open-hearted confession, warmed by the sly cadences of the drumming and swelling with melody thanks to the magnificent piano lines of Joanna Newsom, a first-rate songwriter and Smog's labelmate.

Elsewhere, it's mainly the shadows of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson that loom large (not coincidentally, the album was recorded at the latter's Pedernales Studios in Spicewood, Texas). Hence the little country-blues party of "The Well", or the slow-motion western of "I'm New Here", almost statuesque in its austerity, or again the campfire song of "In The Pines" (a traditional commonly attributed to Leadbelly). These are refined but somewhat mannered exercises, if not downright academic, betraying an inspiration that wavers in the writing. Sheer class, in other words, isn't quite enough to dispel the sense of a songwriting style growing ever more self-referential, and now dangerously close to a dead end.

Having already produced some of the finest singer-songwriter albums of the past fifteen years, Mr. Callahan may be starting to show some signs of fading, but he has certainly not made peace with himself. And that, in the end, is what still gives cause for hope.

In 2007, surprisingly, our man set aside the Smog moniker to reclaim his own identity (Bill Callahan) on Woke On A Whaleheart, an album steeped in refined country-folk.

We can't know for certain whether the choice was also influenced by Callahan's new partner, Joanna Newsom, whose “Ys” was one of the most acclaimed and discussed albums of 2006, but some passages on the record really do sound like the work of a heart in love. Just listen to the opening "From The Rivers To The Ocean", achingly delicate, a piano suspended in mid-air, violin cradling us, and guitar as a muted accompaniment that only once lets itself go into a solo.

Callahan's country framework, though, has little that's conventional about it: beyond the drum-driven gallop of "Footprints", you can hear it, for instance, in the woozy "Diamond Dancer".

The album manages to string together small delights: the splendid guitar filigree of the folk tune "Sycamore", the futuristic western of "Honeymoon Child", or "Day", with its piano dwelling on a few chords repeated in a hypnotic rhythm, but above all "Night", a lullaby in which the voice strolls lightly along a path of few, repeated piano notes, a rarefied lunar nocturne that suddenly turns luminous in the wake of notes falling like stars. The country-rock of "The Wheel" and the closing "A Man Needs A Woman…", with more than a nod to the late Johnny Cash, bring things full circle.

This, however, seems to be just a parenthesis, since the following Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle builds an evident bridge back to the reflective mood of the last album released under the Smog name. Callahan himself seems to confess as much, scattering throughout the lyrics of the nine songs on this record more or less explicit references to a disillusionment that's hard not to trace back to the end of his relationship with Newsom: “I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again”. These are, broadly speaking, narratives halfway between singing and speaking, centred on themes of human relationships, nature and religion, approached with apparent detachment and in a calm crooner's register, perfectly suited to the depth of a rich variety of arrangements, enriched by the understated centrality of strings, paired with fairly pronounced rhythms, rough upbeats and even simple acoustic arpeggios.

It's often the modulations of the strings that shape the songs into different shades, pairing harmonic surges and rougher, darker ripples with an overall elegance of pace that inevitably brings to mind Leonard Cohen. Orchestral taste, melodic sensitivity and dense hints of alcohol and tobacco easily recall the great Canadian artist, finding a compelling outcome in the nearly ten minutes of the closing "Faith/Void", which showcases writing perfectly suited to Callahan's unmistakable velvety timbre and to the expert ease with which he reclaims his most classic songwriting.

And it's precisely the surprising naturalness of his classicism that forms the core of the album, without making it in the least predictable. Much of the credit for this goes to arranger Brian Beattie, who helped craft a rich, refined sonic framework that has nothing to envy in the celebrated work of Van Dyke Parks, and which makes the crooner's new clothes, worn with ease by a mournful yet once again inspired Callahan, shine with an old-fashioned elegance.

“We're gonna get right down to business, tonight”: so begins the journey into Bill Callahan's bathysphere, decked out in warmly diffused lights, which take us to a small Australian venue in 2007 — when the adventure under the Smog pseudonym was drawing to a close. After the successful consecration of 2009 with Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, Callahan seems to want to rebuild from the start, with Rough Travel For A Rare Thing, his own path away from the world of lo-fi singer-songwriting, offering a continuation still centred on his figure, on his velvety crooning, underpinned by a firm rhythm section and lively strings. Despite being a live album, everything sounds far more polished than his earlier output.

Although the concert documented on this latest release focuses, for obvious reasons, on our man's output under the Smog name, concentrating in particular on his last release under that name, A River Ain't Too Much To Love, this live set already reveals a newfound expressive maturity, especially in Callahan's vocal delivery, an ability to tell stories with warmth and detachment at once. A "fullness", a vitality perhaps never heard before, emerges in small details: take, for example, the clattering, festive rendition of "Let Me See The Colts", or the nervous irony of "The Well".

At other times it's the electric clothing that dissolves, in favour of a closer adherence to more classic singer-songwriter conventions: such is the case with "Held" (from "Knock Knock"), which here turns into a wild, compelling folk tune. It's no surprise that it's precisely the tracks from his earlier repertoire that end up most transfigured: notable above all is the closer, "Bathysphere". The synthetic beat is replaced by that unmistakable, rounded pulse, the guitar raptures are handed over to the violins, and so a new wave evocation turns into a theatrical acoustic gallop.

More of a loner than ever, Callahan returns to the studio to release Apocalypse in 2011.

On his fourteenth album, the singer-songwriter from Silver Springs settles into a register that seems less bleak than the subdued introspection of his previous work, donning the rough, worn clothes of the drover ("Drover") to roam alone through hidden valleys, blending into the landscape and mingling his own pain with that of the places and living beings around him ("But the pain and frustration, is not mine/ It belongs to the cattle, through the valley").

The apocalypse that gives the album its title is, on closer inspection, entirely internal, and the purpose of the narrative tied to it is more a kind of catharsis, an emotional pacification to be achieved by temporarily stepping away from the ordinary turmoil of everyday and romantic life. It is, however, only a partial detachment, so much so that throughout the record there often surface prickly reflections on contemporary life and cold-blooded emotional dissections, right up to the realization that the artist cannot help but turn his gaze inward (“Without work’s calving increments/ Or love’s coltish punch/ What would I be?”) and around himself, towards an "America!" that is "grand and golden", recounted not without a dose of cynical detachment, amid electric disturbances and bluesy obliqueness.

This rediscovered emotional charge is accompanied by a more lively and biting mode of expression than the romantic self-pity of the previous record; in Apocalypse, a variety of registers prevails, whose relative harshness goes beyond the stylistic hallmarks of alt-country to settle on Southern references ranging from a latent Delta blues to jazzy shades, passing through a whole series of whistles and arpeggios with a markedly bucolic flavour. But whatever the sonic backdrop, Callahan finds a way to exercise his by-now seasoned crooning in medium-to-long songs, ideal for the stories and confessions of an artist who, with the passing of years and personal experience, becomes an ever more refined chronicler of a solitude understood simply as integration with a mysterious surrounding environment still to be discovered.

If there is such a thing as a placid, sly art form, Callahan is its sorcerer, and on Dream River (2013) he doesn't skimp on the artistry displayed on the previous Apocalypse.

The more classic garb of Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle maybe fit Bill a little too tightly, yet he pours into it such warmth and devotion that the label called it his most passionate work (the feverish "Spring", the suave "Small Plane", the comfortable, loose-limbed crooning of "Winter Road").

Despite the difference in approach and style, there's a certain affinity with the Iron And Wine album of the same year: subdued arrangements, vaguely jazzy in places ("Seagull"), over which Callahan's baritone lays down his obsessive mantras, slipping in images and epiphanies with his wise grumbling.

An expressive awareness that seeps into every instrumental embellishment on the record, probably even sharper than on the jams of "Apocalypse" (as in the inconclusive, revelatory "Ride My Arrow", caught between existential statements and ornithological metaphors), reinforcing the aura surrounding him — the Cormac McCarthy of songwriting?

Perhaps too oblique — certainly not a listen free of rough edges, despite its benevolent tone — to stir the same emotions as "Sometimes…", Dream River knows how to seduce and transport, albeit in a way similar to the protagonist of "The Sing": "Looking out a window that isn't there".

Well, it’s been such a long time

Why don't you come on in?

Yes, a lot of time has passed, something has changed, but maybe it's still worth stepping inside. Bill Callahan has married Hanly Banks, become a father to little Bass, has fun on Twitter, doesn't seem to want to leave his beloved Austin, and his entire back catalogue is on Spotify. Given the steady pace at which the former Smog had accustomed us since way back in 1990 with "Sewn To The Sky", the long silence following Dream River was starting to weigh heavy. Fortunately, Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest arrives to our ears: regarding the hiatus, our man is quick to set things straight on "Writing", because life may change, but a mission/vocation doesn't:

It feels good to be writing again

Clear water flows from my pen

And it sure feels good to be writing again

I’m stuck in the high rapids, night closes in

It feels good to be singing again

Yeah, it sure feels good to be singing again

Ride the wave of great music

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