A Week With Bill Callahan's "Woke On A Whaleheart": Day 1
15 August 2007
tell your friends...
Words by Joel Minor // Illustration by Chris Gregori
When, in the spring of 2005, Bill Callahan (née Smog) released his first album, recorded in Central Texas, his new home, it didn’t surprise me that it was titled A River Ain’t Too Much to Love. As a fellow adopted Texan myself, it instantly made sense. Texans love their rivers. This is evident in their most beloved book, Goodbye to a River by John Graves, about a canoe trip down a portion of the Brazos, and which is nationally regarded as a classic in the same vein as Thoreau.
But in the book Graves keeps a playful distance from “Saint Henry” by infusing a certain resignation to encroaching modernity and a resistance to romanticizing history, all the while etching out a pastoral, personal relationship with the rocks, rapids, wildlife, weather, ghosts and locals that speak to him on his journey. No ornery activist, he is a clever realist, with a gift for musing on nature’s and man’s intricate balances and maddening complications, with simple and subdued language.
Which brings me back to Callahan. He shares with Graves this proclivity for economy with words, this pessimism toward message, this individualistic detachment, with humor and irony often his main weapons. Yet there is a universal connection, a naturalism expressed that others can relate to, and just enough story to keep us moving along with the song’s currents, riding a raft of our own experience.
And now I’m back to rivers, one of Callahan’s recurrent natural features, especially lately. He’s visited a widow on a river’s banks, overlooked inmates swimming and floating on a river, become born again in a valley maker, found love while rising from a river’s bottom, and drank as a teenager at a dam.
A River Ain’t Too Much to Love used the river lyrically as a transformative tool, made all the more salient in the music’s stripped-down, arid, meandering atmosphere. Callahan makes it plain in the opening song of his new record, Woke on a Whaleheart, that he’s not done with the river yet or its baptismal ways. After a slow, ponderous piano line, that familiar slow, ponderous voice drops in, just as deep as the piano notes are high.
“When. When you are blind. You touch things. For their shapes. Have faith in wordless knowledge.” It’s one of Callahan’s most direct philosophical statements, and probably the first one of such directness to open a record. But it immediately goes on to become an invitation: “Well. I could tell you about the river. Or, we could just get in.” The listener thinks he’s done with the thought, the emphasis made on just getting in, but he’s not quite. “The body the rain made of our days before we knew.”
So there’s more to this river than a valley maker or a place to swim or drink by or grasp at gold rings in. He defines it, in typically laconic style, as a sum to get into, to follow, and repeats it as such throughout the six-plus minute song, as a chorus of sorts that ends with the admission that “it’s hard to explain what I was doing or thinking before you.” But it’s one of Callahan’s best metaphorical images, conjuring up the unconscious and elemental forces of not only transformation but awakening; equating rain-to-rivers-to-oceans with being unable to imagine life without a certain person or a present state of existing.
It’s hard to guess where this album could go next, “From the Rivers to the Oceans” feeling like a full journey in itself, twisting past and present, riding gentle currents and swells into what is an even more popular Callahan setting: the ocean. It’s a long and languid introduction to the album, promising organic swirls of electric guitar, keyboard, violin and backing vocals to accentuate the lyric narration.
Knowing Callahan’s work so well, I don’t believe he’ll have trouble explaining what was before, any more than what is now or what comes next. Even while urging faith in wordless knowledge he’s already shown he’s not at a loss for words to express physical and metaphysical progression and relationship. It’s his inherent coyness that keeps any direct definition at bay, even while his confidence with alluring and striking imagery defies dismissal.
But regardless, getting in is all the explanation necessary.
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