Bill Callahan raises Cain with Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle

By Katy Henriksen
Published: April 14th, 2009 | 4:30am

Bill Callahan, soft spoken as he answers interview questions via phone from his home in Austin, contemplates each question carefully before proceeding to answer in a matter-of-fact way. His speaking delivery is much the same way he sings. What may be easily miscalculated at first as disinterest is something else entirely.

In his second release under his own name, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle (Drag City), his signature baritone is nearly devoid of inflection or flourishes and his barebones lyrics are complemented by orchestral strings and muted horn arrangements. This somehow all makes perfect sense when considering his penchant for elements of noir.

A track on the album, “Jim Cain,” is a reference to James M. Cain, a 20th Century crime novelist who Callahan enjoys reading. “Yeah, I’ve got a real soft spot for that stuff. I mean, he’s credited with inventing the — what’s it called — the hardboiled style, although he never liked that phrase. He wouldn’t call himself that,” Callahan says. Callahan admires Cain for his clarity of writing and also for the seedy melodramatic plots in his noir novels. “A lot of times it’s kind of trashy. A lot of them are bad, but they’re still fun to read. I like the history of the dime novel.”

As the opening track, “Jim Cain” starts with a simple guitar line that slowly fills with down-tempo drums. Violins climb the higher register in heavily bowed, long slurs as a cello line paces alongside Callahan’s first verse: “I started out in search of ordinary things / How much of a tree bends in the wind?” As the violins crescendo into a melancholy sweetness, Callahan’s timbre remains steady and slow, his clear words sung in almost a whisper. In other words, the song has mimicked the crime noir he admires. Both the clarity and melodrama are there, setting the tone for the entire album, which is at once sparse and epic, dark and shimmering.

Eagle, which some critics would deem a slick departure from Callahan’s humble, lo-fi 4-track beginning when he recorded nearly a dozen albums under his longtime moniker Smog, really isn’t all that different when considering the sincerity that is still conveyed in equal proportions. Muffled scratchiness and sloppy guitar strums may have disappeared, but the essence of what makes Callahan distinguishable remains, though, like Cain, he also shares a disdain for labels.

“I’ve never liked the lo-fi name,” Callahan remarks. “I think people use it incorrectly. People used to ask me about it in every interview, and I was trying to figure out what they meant because I would make a record at a really good studio that was actually hi-fi. I think, personally, people are meaning minimalism when they call it lo-fi, which it’s not. I’ve always kind of been baffled by it. Obviously my first couple records I did record at home on a cassette 4-track, but whatever I was doing then is nothing like what I’m doing now,” he says. “I guess that usually what you start out doing, that’s what you are to most people, that’s the position they’re watching you from, because people don’t want you change ….” But change he has, in that he now records in a studio and procures all sorts of instrumentation to frame what were once skeletal songs. Although the recording may be hi-fi, the process is really not much different than playing live.

Callahan worked with Brian Beattie, who arranged the strings and horns in addition to producing Eagle. Known for live and 2-track recording techniques, Beattie adds another layer of clarity to the mix. “You can’t do any overdubs, and you mix it while it’s being recording. Everything’s all at once, everything has to be right during the performance,” Callahan explains of the process. “He adjusts the levels of the instruments and does whatever little mixing he can do while it’s actually being recorded. Once you get it on tape, that’s it; you can’t do anything about it.”

As for writing the material, Callahan says that it all comes out really fast. “The past several records have been written in two or three months, just working on it for 10 hours a day, every day. The way I tend to work is after a record comes out, I do about a year of really bad work that doesn’t go anywhere, and all of a sudden something just clicks.” After he’s written the songs, he says, he books the studio for a deadline, which he claims helps him to finish things up. Unlike multi-track recording, in which songs can be transformed, Callahan prefers this technique, which basically has him performing live in the studio. It’s a lot of pressure to get it right, but this way of recording preserves a sense of urgency and honesty that are trademarks of his songs.

The results on his albums speak to these sensibilities. Eagle unravels like a tightly constructed 1940s pulp novel. There’s mystery, darkness, and romance alongside economy of language, simplicity, and accessibility. There may be no evidence of Callahan’s lo-fi beginnings other than his largely unchanged voice, but the minimalism remains. It’s just been embellished to embrace Callahan’s penchant for American noir.

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