Hamer Hall
Shortly after the siren tones ring out over the heads of the throng rowdying up the Arts Centre foyer, announcing that Bill Callahan is about to take to the stage, the crowd inside the venue hushes. As latecomers file in, heads bowed, a four-piece assembles in the centre of what seems like a vast stage, and a spell is cast.
The man once known as Smog, with the help of the deft jazz drumming of Adam Jones, Brian Beattie’s electric double bass and Matt Kinsey’s textural electric guitar, sets about bringing his most recent, and most acclaimed album, Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, to life. Opening with the welcome of Writing, “it sure feels good to be singing again /From the mountain and the mountain within”, the mood is instantly confessional, sincere and often blackly comic. Cutting an elegant figure on stage, Callahan’s top button remains fastened around his neck, his trousers belted high and his parlour acoustic guitar high over his breast. His silver hair thick, like a television host from the 1960s, his Byrne-esque penchant for running slowly on the spot, seemingly an outlet for nerves, and his rich baritone, the sound of a maple tree being slowly felled, delivered to the audience through a sound system bent on capturing every syllable.
That the set features few songs from before Callahan’s hiatus from 2013 to 2019 speaks to how differently Callahan is connecting to his songs now. With many inspired by the change in his life of marriage, fatherhood, the death of a parent and a reassembled life that was no longer focused around music, songs now express dazzlement at the idea of domesticity. Over and over tonight, Callahan expresses a yearning for the simple and fantastical. “Come with me to the country”, he sings. “Just you and me”. Or, “I'm just talking about the old days / Groundwork or footwork / Well, after this next song we'll get moving along”.
Behind these homely sentiments, the band fill the space like physical embodiments of Callahan’s mind, sinuously occupying higher frequencies with cymbal brushes or melodic lines the grow from his strummed chords. The bass balloons through the room before vanishing to ensure not a word of Callahan’s is missed, a quality that could only be born from rehearsals that move from the musical to the telepathic. Older songs such as America and Too Many Birds are given freeform workouts. The first stretches out to allow Kinsey’s guitar to spiral and heave as he pushes against Jones’s rhythms, the second allows Callahan to tell us about his first 24 hours in Australia, time he spent sleep, feeling hungry, wandering the streets at night looking for food, and eating garlic toast, a story he invests with pathos, humour and warmth. It is also impossible to tell whether it was meticulously rehearsed or improvised.
Highlights of the night include a stunning rendition of album highlights 747, Watching Me Get Married and Angela. Dips into his back catalog include Drover, Riding For the Feeling and Seagull. So strong are these songs, and so gloriously are they rendered, that classics such as Jim Cain and songs from his first 12 albums are barely missed. Even a cover of Leonard Cohen’s So Long, Marianne seems oddly a part of Callahan’s collection, and the song’s imagery – “You held on to me like I was a crucifix” – doesn’t seem out of place alongside his, “Like motel curtains, we never really met / And cutting our losses is our best bet”. As he asks in the closing verse of tonight’s opening song, ”Sometimes I have to wonder / Where have all the good songs gone?” Tonight, we’re given bigger things to wonder about.
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