SMOG - My Days Of 58

It's unusual to take stock of one's life on the eve of one's fifty-eighth birthday, and even more so for a figure as averse to sentimentality as Bill Callahan. Yet for the American musician, 2026 is a particularly significant year, coming just over a month after surgery to remove a colon tumor diagnosed in late 2025. For an artist accustomed to grappling with themes like loneliness, anguish and death, an album like "My Days Of 58" is thus far more than just a collection of songs.

After three years of touring, superbly documented on two live albums, "Resuscitate!" and "What A Night", Bill Callahan's first album of new material plays like a journey into the underworld — offering not so much answers as a string of questions.

Plenty of questions arise right from the opening track, "Why Do Men Sing", a descent into the underworld where Lou Reed acts as a modern-day Virgil, guiding the artist to a place where the answers turn out to be just as many questions.

Don't be fooled by the introspective premise of "My Days Of 58" — Bill Callahan hasn't abandoned his usual humor and skepticism; however poignant, the songs never wallow in melancholy or self-pity. Even when the mood turns heavy and the horns take on an almost funereal tone ("Steppin' Out For Air"), the lyrics remain surreal, and the pace picks up when a squirrel makes its way into the narrative, the true protagonist of one of the album's most musically complex compositions.

The solid backing of the musicians — including Jim White (Dirty Three) on drums, Matt Kinsey on guitar and Dustin Laurenzi on saxophone — is responsible for the sharper edge of many tracks, some potentially upbeat but always deep and charged with tension, like the biting "The Man I'm Supposed To Be": chosen as the single and the manifesto of an album pulsing with thematic tension, both lyrically and musically.

The desperate cry of revolt against technological excess in "Computer" and the bittersweet musings on the musician's role in the gorgeous folk-jazz-kraut number "Pathol O. G." define two songs that only seem ordinary on the surface, giving us a Callahan who's as sardonic as ever, in the vein of Randy Newman — so much so that the acoustic genuineness of the former and the intricate orchestration of the latter end up complementing each other, two tracks unusually direct in their debunking clarity.

On this journey toward old age, there are dissonant signals, as impenetrable as ever: the life on the road evoked by the steel guitar in "Highway Born" has little in common with the swaying, ambient, Eastern-tinged atmospheres of "The World Is Still", as if setting the urge to travel against the obstacles life throws up every day — and it's perhaps within this uncertainty about the future that the imagined father-son dialogue of the delicate "Empathy" is contained.

In this play of contrasts, past and present carry equal weight: against the nostalgic "West Texas" (featuring an excellent Richard Bowden on violin), where Callahan seems to briefly echo Don McLean's "Vincent", and the equally forlorn love letter to his city, Austin, "Lonely City", the songwriter sets a furious, chaotic and deceptively improvised "And Dream Land", where the steel guitar this time gets swallowed up by a jazz-rock-country jam.

After all, for the former Smog mastermind, music is malleable material, shaped to serve the stories he wants to tell, and the ones on "My Days Of 58" are intense and endearing, but above all rich in a humanity that feels almost revolutionary these days.

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04/03/2026