A Week With Bill Callahan's "Woke On A Whaleheart": Day 2
17 August 2007
tell your friends...
Words by Joel Minor // Illustration by Chris Gregori
Jarred awake to the past, to the beach, with pounding fierceness, the speculation just like that turns from what before to what hence. No canned and facile poem of reliance on God, “Footprints” is a violin, drum and “oh!” vocal march of two individuals not knowing any better, leaving the ground together. Granted, the dove is often associated with heavenly guidance, peace and love, but here I suspect the dove is chosen for the maternal and transformative power it brings to the song.
Through the years I’ve often read the word “misogynist” or the like when critics and interviewers have described Callahan’s songs and persona. But I never bought it, even through all his bitter-sounding accounts of past girlfriends, break-ups and being alone, like a song an act of revenge for a knifed heart. I never bought it because there’s always been the sense that it’s these epic battles of the sexes that have made him tick, feel real, and belong. And besides, if he were a she and singing with the same candor and bite, no one would dare peg her a sexist.
However, along these lines I do notice a change, as the earthly Smog soul dies and enters Callahan heaven. (It’s probably the only change I’ve picked up on, because musically, at least, Smog has always been about change.) He’s singing about the sway of two people, and the sexes relating, rather than battling. So far, at least, two songs in, there isn’t a hint that the looking back is through the eyes of a spurned man, dying to sting back a lost love in his isolation.
Just as suddenly as “Footprints” began, it ends, concluding that since the pair can’t fly, they “must have danced up into the sky.” And just as jarringly as that song started, so does the next, “Diamond Dancer,” complete with the violin, drum, and “oh!” intro beats, but also supported by a funky, disco bass line. Callahan’s voice goes high, seduced by his subject morphing this time like minerals do over millions of years.
He isn’t spying on this dancer expanding her seas, or recounting doing it himself in dirty pants, or admonishing the act itself while time is flowing. This time he’s enjoying, encouraging what he sees — another miraculous achievement in movement, like water flowing or birds flying or feet making prints. And while the action is solitary, it’s someone else’s blissful experience he’s relaying, not his own.
I might imagine her the diamond for one of the rings the couple saw last song. Wedding and engagement, so often a source of disdain and suspicion in the past, this time tied to an isolated and energetic link between earth and sky. We don’t learn much about this dancer, except she does what she dreams, and she is willing to give her life to the world in the midst of — or because of — making her imagination happen.
We don’t learn much about her, but we can see her dancing. As he often accomplishes so well, Callahan gives us a picture but doesn’t get in the way to explain what he’s painted. She is a real person under the lights, and also a metaphorical, molten lover of the whole earth. She’s forever locked in the crystallizing moment; perhaps that’s what she is giving the world tonight.
And she may just be the first disco ball ever to spin to the strings of a violin. Again, “Diamond Dancer” is the sibling of “Footprints,” in the abrupt, emphatic way it ends. Together they are the carefree, grooving children to the wise and weathered “From the Rivers to the Oceans.”
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