Bill Callahan’s state of grace

Callahan’s 35-year career arc can be summed up by a song called Jim Cain, from his lauded 2009 album, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, which opens his recent set in a hot north London theatre. As he delivers the song’s semi-autobiographical lines – “I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again,” he sings tenderly – his voice is accompanied only by his guitar and his own feet, one playing a drum pad, the other a small high hat.

Callahan’s early protagonists were not always people you would want to hang out with, much less shack up with. His old times are cold-blooded. As Smog, in the 1990s, he appeared as a lo-fi outsider, often drawn to character studies of difficult men, his deadpan delivery of arresting lyrics allied to minimal, unfussy music. He examined life with a gimlet eye, one that captured chilling happenings with writing that could disorient and disturb the listener.

“I break horses, I don’t tend to them,” he sang on 1996’s I Break Horses, a track that combined a taste for touchstone myths of the American west and an alarming attitude towards romantic entanglements. His 2011 song Drover provided the theme tune for Wild Wild Country, Netflix’s excellent 2018 documentary about an Oregon cult in the 1980s.

He remains an artist who repays close attention. He is as funny as he is misanthropic; a short‑story writer; a rare artist whose lyrics can stand alone as verse.

Jim Cain is an ode to the American author James M Cain, widely considered the father of hardboiled crime fiction thanks to his novels The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce. But Callahan’s song blends biography and autofiction, combining his projections about Cain with details from his own life.

Callahan was drawn to the parallels between him and Cain: both men were born in Maryland (in 1892 and 1966 respectively; Callahan now lives in Austin, Texas). “He wanted to be a singer, like me,” Callahan said in 2009. “But he was told he wasn’t good enough. Like me. He died in alcoholic obscurity. Hmmmm. I also like that his middle name was Mallahan.”

“With the death of the shadow came a lightness of verse,” Callahan sings on Jim Cain. Like Nick Cave, another storied examiner of the dark hearts of men, Callahan has unexpectedly found a later-life state of grace, and the results are just as fascinating as Smog’s old skewering frankness. This turning point was marked by his 17th (or so) album, Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest (2019). “The panic room is now a nursery,” he sang then.

Tonight’s set offers a snapshot of his rich body of work, with a hefty dose of Smog-era songs to suit the stripped-back set-up. One of his greatest hits, Cold Blooded Old Times, is virtually unrecognisable, its lyric intact but the guitar part unfamiliar. The Well (2005) is a short story contained within a song: its plot climaxes in watching a droplet of water refuse to fall, then finally succumb. The rapt audience, freed by some chit-chat from Callahan, begins to shout requests.

One of the oldest songs Callahan plays tonight is Teenage Spaceship from his 1999 Knock Knock LP, another slyly autobiographical work (“I was a teenage smog, sewn to the sky”). One of the newest is Partition, from the great 2022 album YTILAER. “Meditate, ventilate, do what you’ve got to do,” Callahan sings as guitar, drum pad and cymbal create mantra-like urgency. “Microdose, change your clothes, you gotta do what you gotta do.” These modern habits, the song suggests, are all in service of one thing: “To see the picture!”

As mellowness and delight have begun to filter quietly into his works, his output has become more expansive and more vivid. Callahan’s later records have grown more painterly – with no sacrifice in intensity.

Photography by Antonio Olmos for the Observer New Review