The children are at school, and Bill Callahan is enjoying the stillness of an empty house.
“When I was a kid I hated school, but now I love school. I understand now why school was invented,” the cult indie songwriter says, his speaking voice steeped in the same mordant wit that has been a defining feature of his releases for the past 30 years.
On a typical morning he will take advantage of the temporary absence of his wife, the film-maker Hanly Banks, and their two children, to work on music, adding to a repertoire of dark, deadpan songs that, beginning in the early 1990s, have earned him a loyal international following.
There was a time when he would never discuss his daily routine with a stranger. For many years, in fact, he refused to talk to journalists altogether, a reluctance born of introversion and an understandable aversion to having his art dissected. But, as is often the way, middle age and parenthood have brought a new mellowness. At 59, this high priest of 1990s bedroom angst has become a low-key king of chill.
“I think a lot of young people’s depression – quote, unquote – is actually just confusion and a sort of lack of rootedness,” Callahan says ahead of his show in Dublin this weekend. “As you get older you figure some things out. You start to put down some roots. The music reflects [that]. Man, if I was still writing like I did when I was 23, I’d be in a bad state. If I still had that same outlook.”
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His outlook back then was bleak to the point of almost bumping up against self-parody. Consider his fourth album, Wild Love, from 1995, and lyrics such as “When you’re down on your luck, and you just can’t cope … Don’t turn to me ’cause I’m no hope.”
Wild Love was one of 14 LPs he put out under the stage name Smog. Those albums hardly made him a superstar, but his fans were steadfast, and he had moments in the spotlight. His fantastically morbid ballad Cold-Blooded Old Times, for instance, featured on the soundtrack to the hit movie adaptation of Nick Hornby’s book High Fidelity.
By 2005, however, he had grown tired of his stage name, which he felt restricted him as an artist – though his label, the Chicago alternative powerhouse Drag City, disagreed, saying that Smog’s abstruseness as an alias gave him huge creative latitude. He went ahead and became Bill Callahan anyway.
“Changing the name was to demarcate a change for myself,” he told Pitchfork in 2007. “A reminder. My record label discouraged it. I said I wanted change. They said, ‘The cool thing about Smog is that it could be anything and still be Smog.’ But even this began to feel like a twisted sheet, something that limited movement. Even having the concept that it could be anything at all felt restrictive. As if the wide-openness defined it.”
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In reverting to Bill Callahan, he became a different songwriter. Though still steeped in his trademark pithiness, and defined by his indie-disco-Sinatra singing, the songs become more outward-looking and increasingly characterised by a generosity of spirit and soulfulness.
Those qualities are front and centre of his most recent studio album, Ytilaer, from 2023, a project written in the aftermath of the pandemic that functions as a plea to put away our screens and connect with life as it is lived, minute by minute. “We’re coming out of dream,” he croons on its opening track, First Bird, a song about engaging with the world and stepping away from the ersatz comforts of the digital realm.
He hasn’t changed completely, however. On stage and in person, his laconic wit is always near the surface. He laughs a lot as he talks – when he’s on stage there’s a sense that he’s chuckling in the face of an uncaring cosmos if for no other reason than that it’s better than crying.
“It’s how I live my life. I approach most of life with humour. Leading with humour – it’s the fun way to live. It is fun to try to get people to laugh. And for other people to try to get other people to try to be humorous too.
“It’s my modus operandi … I was depressed when I was in my early 20s. Like a lot of early-20-year-olds. But you might as well. It’s too much if you don’t throw some humour in there. Nobody wants to hear it.”
Callahan put out his first live album last year. It’s a maximalist affair featuring a saxophone player and lashings of guitar and strings. His performance in Dublin will be more stripped down, for mostly practical reasons.
“I have been doing a lot of solo shows in the past few years, largely because the cost of living all over the world … it’s going up. But the fees I get paid have stayed the same. It’s really hard to bring a band on the road. I’ve been doing a lot of solo things.”
He’s had to find ways of making a one-man show feel bigger and more dramatic. It can’t just be a guy on stage with a guitar and a heart of woe.
“Two or three years ago I started using a looper and backing tracks of some sort. Or a loop or a drone or something like that. Just to make it … as if I’m playing with somebody. It’s so much easier playing just one instrument by yourself. When you’re not a virtuoso, it’s hard to make that compelling.”
He adds: “Even if you add just the slight, little noise – one piano note that you’ve looped – it transforms everything. Then I’m interacting with something that isn’t me, even if I made that loop. It’s almost like having a bandmate up there. I can interact. That makes what I’m playing sing. It gives it more dimension.”
Callahan has long had a following in Ireland. Early in his career he was championed by DJs and journalists here, particularly Donal Dineen, through his No Disco series on RTÉ.
“Dublin was an early adopter of me. It’s kind of waxed and waned over the years – sometimes just due to the economy. Sometimes different countries get into different albums,” he says. “One record might be big in Spain, and Germany doesn’t like it, and then the next one, Germany loves it, and Spain’s not that into it.”
He pauses, and there it is again: that flash of humour, bright as sunshine in deepest winter. “It’s really quite strange.”
Bill Callahan plays the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, on Sunday, July 20th