A Week With Bill Callahan's "Woke One A Whaleheart": Day 4
29 August 2007
tell your friends...
Words by Joel Minor // Illustration by Chris Gregori
Now we come to “Day” and “Night” — nothing more balanced than that, right? Wrong. For one thing, this day is as dark as night, or at least appears to be. For another, some people kill and steal whatever they can. The earth itself seems to have given in to its longstanding abuse. Callahan is here to serve as guide through the confusion, though. Fear not, honeymoon child.
It’s not often that Callahan gives out-and-out answers to questions regarding what his songs are about, but in a telling article/interview in the Austin Chronicle in April, he was uncharacteristically talkative about “Day,” which the writer uses as an example of the entire album’s 1970s vibe, and which he likens to Harry Nilsson’s songwriting. Here’s what Callahan said:
“It’s about day, as in facing facts in the light of day. It’s about the crumbling environment. It’s about Gorge Bush and his cronies. It’s about making babies. It’s about the struggle we all have for our bodies and minds to be harmonious with our surroundings, with nature. When we are not healthily striving for this, we cast it out of ourselves and make war so struggle can be incarnate and maneuvered like chess pieces. I would prefer it if Gorge Bush just went back to war on himself with cocaine and booze and a musicless life and left us alone.”
Wow. And amen. Luckily, though, there’s no such straight-up political language in the song itself. While I agree with such sentiment, I’d hate to see this or any other of Callahan’s songs go topical and inevitably become dated. Same with songs getting purely personal and trapped by their own references. That just wouldn’t be Bill either. He keeps it abstract, so we don’t automatically assume he’s singing about “Gorge” Bush at the beginning or about girlfriend Joanna Newsom toward the end when he brings up the subject of family.
In “Day” there’s a simple, saving grace to family, even if that just means a steadfast relationship between two people. It’s not a source of scorn or combat as in “Cold Blooded Old Times” or “Revanchism,” but a survival instinct, similar to “Rock Bottom Riser” and “I Feel Like the Mother of the World,” that calms the conflict and legitimizes the weariness conflict causes. Which is what makes that quote revealing, beyond the political statement. Callahan’s songs so often favor the characters that hurt themselves more than others, and strive to help others, more than themselves.
The happening, shuffling piano of “Day” becomes relaxed and restful in “Night,” slowly repeating lines like a lullaby. In this song there’s a vulnerability and there’s a security that we all often feel at night, at one time or another, tired and reviewing our day just passed or trying to predict the one upcoming. In “Night” it feels like a satisfied resignation, not having to understand all we ponder about. It feels like a wistful appreciation, of the chance to ponder something so miraculous at all.
Callahan’s songs thrive on the small miracles born from contradiction, embodied often in a mysterious “you” — a person who can walk behind but lead the way. “Truth Serum” and “A Guiding Light,” both from Supper, come to mind: a man leaves a party twice to sit on the roof alone under the stars to answer imaginary and perplexing questions; a man longs for darkness so he can spot his guiding light, who was born in the middle of the night.
Now you escape through the door every night that holds you in. This is what we don’t understand, and where you go, and what the door even is, but it doesn’t bother us much, any more than how love is something in an empty box, or why I need to stay up all night proving myself wrong. Or how exactly you have changed, as Mr. Bones claimed. Because a wing can always turn.
As can a dream, without a moment’s notice. The sleeper’s subconscious mind, randomly toying with insecurities and wishes, circumstances and interactions, can go anywhere at anytime, yet confined to the very conscious mind that supplied it with such and will return, to slowly put time, place, inhibitions back in order. Identity and infinity, restraining and relinquishing one another, as certain as the silent spin of the earth.
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