Bill Callahan

William Rahr Callahan was born on June 3, 1966, and began in the lo-fi genre, with home-made tape albums recorded on four-track recorders. He was a highly experimental artist, using substandard instruments and equipment; his early songs lacked melodic structure and were played clumsily on poorly tuned guitars, which gave the dissonant sounds on his self-released cassettes. A lot of this early output was instrumental, a stark contrast to the lyrical focus of his later work.

The lo-fi sound was not mainly an aesthetic choice, the biography page says: it came from having no resources to make and record music any other way. That changed once he signed with Drag City, when he began to use recording studios and a greater variety of instruments.

Most sources consider Sewn to the Sky to be Smog’s first album, made after several cassette-only recordings. It was recorded in Georgia and Maryland, and the liner notes say it was made on a “dumpster Portastudio”. The experimental record combined home recording, substandard instruments and repetitive, noisy song structures, and was an early example of the lo-fi genre.

Spin wrote that it found Callahan “relishing the process, with little regard for form or the guitar he was still learning to really play”. Trouser Press called it “primitive and promising”, and the New Yorker, looking back, described a “discordant, inscrutable, and periodically frustrating collection of mostly instrumental, low-fidelity noise”, with few hints of the “lucid and tender folk music” he would make almost thirty years later.

Forgotten Foundation was Smog’s second album and the first on Drag City, the independent label founded in Chicago in 1989 by Dan Koretzky and Dan Osborn, to which Callahan has stayed signed ever since. It is the last album he recorded at home.

Once he signed with Drag City, the biography page says, he began to use recording studios and a greater variety of instruments, and from 1993 to 2000 his recordings grew more polished, with more instruments and better sound quality.

The third Smog album came after two LPs recorded at home in an experimental lo-fi way, and Callahan decided to make it in a professional studio. He still kept control of the recording, with only Kim Osterwalder helping out, on cello.

The record found some unlikely places. “One Less Star” appeared in Above the Below, a 2003 documentary about a stunt by David Blaine. The Flaming Lips covered “Chosen One” live in a record store in Minneapolis on December 12, 1993, and the recording later appeared on their EP Due to High Expectations... the Flaming Lips Are Providing Needles for Your Balloons. “37 Push Ups” appeared on Kill Rock Stars’ compilation Rock Stars Kill.

Burning Kingdom was Callahan’s second EP. It is the first of two collaborations with the drummer Ron Burns, and the start of his work with Cynthia Dall, who sings on “Renée Died 1:45”. Steven Zdybel plays violin, and Kim Osterwalder plays cello, as she did on Julius Caesar. “My Shell” is an electric version of the 1991 single of the same name.

Dall, an American lo-fi musician and photographer, had begun recording and performing with Callahan, then her boyfriend. Her first appearance on a Smog record was “Wine Stained Lips”, the B-side of the 1994 “A Hit” 7-inch, and the biography page says that the two worked closely together early in his career and sang on each other’s albums.

Wild Love was Smog’s fourth album. Jim O’Rourke played cello on it, the first of his collaborations with Smog, and Drag City’s Rian Murphy, who produced it, helped Callahan develop a wider musical palette than on Julius Caesar. Cynthia Dall plays guitar on two songs and sings on one; Ron Burns drums on three.

The record was well reviewed. AllMusic’s Jason Ankeny, in a retrospective biography of Smog, called it “a triumph of abject failure”, one that “reflected [Callahan’s] bitter obsessions with stunning clarity”.

Kicking a Couple Around is an EP of four songs, released on Drag City in April 1996 and re-released in Europe on Domino in 2001. “Your New Friend” was recorded during a 1995 John Peel radio session; “Back in School”, “I Break Horses” and “The Orange Glow of a Stranger’s Living Room” were recorded by Steve Albini.

Callahan said in an interview that he wrote “I Break Horses” to help a friend understand how a man she had spent one night with could not return her phone calls the next day or ever again. Trouser Press praised “The Orange Glow of a Stranger’s Living Room” for its “lovely picking and piano” piercing “the warm gloom of [Smog’s] abiding displacement”, and the Washington Post called the EP “four delicate, downbeat songs that have a trad-country mournfulness”.

The Doctor Came at Dawn is the fifth Smog album. Callahan’s occasional creative partner Cynthia Dall appears on it. It is ten songs, the shortest of them, “Carmelite Light”, 42 seconds long.

Critics found it dark. Uncut wrote: “A dark collection of songs, admittedly, but arguably it marked the maturing of Callahan as a songwriter.” The Cleveland Scene called it “spare and bitter”; CMJ New Music Monthly named it “the bleakest, saddest album of 1996”; and NME ranked it fortieth on their list “Darkest albums ever: 50 of the best”.

Red Apple Falls was Smog’s sixth album. Jim O’Rourke and Callahan recorded it, with help from Phil Bonnet; it is the first of two Smog records O’Rourke produced, and Callahan’s third team-up with him. O’Rourke also plays bass guitar, piano, Hammond organ, hurdy-gurdy and drums on it.

Two of its songs were older than the album. An early version of “Red Apples” had appeared on Callahan’s first EP, Floating, in 1991, and Cat Power later covered it for her album The Covers Record. “I Was a Stranger” was redone for the 2000 EP ’Neath the Puke Tree.

Callahan wrote most of Knock Knock in 1998, driving from South Carolina to Chicago after the end of his relationship with the musician Chan Marshall, known as Cat Power; they had been living in an eight-room farmhouse in Prosperity, South Carolina. He and Jim O’Rourke recorded it in ten days, though O’Rourke’s credit was left off the album at first. The drummers were Thymme Jones and Tim Mulvenna of the Vandermark 5, with Liam Hayes of Plush on guitar on some songs, the avant-garde guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors, a string quartet and a small children’s choir.

In 2013 Callahan said it was “such an exciting thing just to finally have a band”, so different from The Doctor Came at Dawn, and that having an engineer in O’Rourke who liked his music had encouraged him “to go in a more expansive direction”. AllMusic gave it four and a half stars, calling it “Bill Callahan’s subtlest collection of songs yet”; NME listed it tenth among the albums of 1999, and The Independent named it the year’s best pop album.

The eighth Smog album was recorded with John McEntire of Tortoise, who plays drums and percussion and recorded and mixed it. Callahan plays guitar, piano, Hammond organ, synthesizer and jaw harp; Jeff Parker plays guitar, Matt Lux bass, Richard Schuler drums, and Jennifer Collins, Nicole Evans and Damian Rogers sing backing vocals.

Reviews were close to unanimous: Metacritic’s average of ten reviews is 85, “universal acclaim”; Pitchfork placed it tenth on its list of the top 20 albums of 2000 and NME named it the year’s 27th best. It peaked at number 28 on the UK Independent Albums Chart. After Dongs of Sevotion, the biography page says, Callahan began moving back to a slightly simpler instrumentation and recording style.

Callahan put out three EPs in 2000. The Manta Rays of Time, his fourth, came out on Spunk Records in Australia only; one of its songs, “Real Live Dress”, later appeared on Accumulation: None, and it uses elements of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”, lines that Callahan said when asked he thought were “pure and true”, and that he included without irony because he admired their “clarity”. Strayed came out on July 17 on Drag City and Domino and has a reissue of the self-released cassette Cow.

’Neath the Puke Tree, on Drag City on December 11, was recorded by Brent “Sloth” Puncheon and Leah Baker. It has remakes of “I Was a Stranger” from Red Apple Falls and “A Jar of Sand” from Sewn to the Sky, and three new songs. Charlie Gansa plays guitar; Sloth and Jim White play drums, and White would go on to drum on Supper and A River Ain’t Too Much to Love.

The ninth Smog album was recorded by Rob Bochnik, with Jeremy Lemos on two songs. Callahan sings and plays guitar and produced it; around him are Rick Rizzo on guitar, Geoff Greenberg on bass, Jessica Billey on violin and backing vocals, Kyle Bruckmann on English horn and oboe, Nate Lepine on alto saxophone and flute, and Pat Samson on drums.

It is one of the albums, with Supper and A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, in which, the biography page says, the move back toward simpler instrumentation after Dongs of Sevotion is apparent, while the songwriting kept the consistency he had developed. Metacritic’s average of 14 reviews is 73, “generally favorable”.

Accumulation: None collects rarities: B-sides, split-single tracks, Peel sessions and EP songs. The discography page lists it under the alias “(Smog)”, and Domino released it in Europe a day before Drag City in North America. It includes one new song, “White Ribbon”.

Its twelve tracks came from all over the first decade: “Astronaut” from the split single with Suckdog, “A Hit” from the Drag City single, “Spanish Moss”, the B-side of the Hausmusik 7-inch “Came Blue”, “Chosen One” and “I Break Horses” as John Peel sessions, “Real Live Dress” from the Australian-only EP The Manta Rays of Time, “Little Girl Shoes” from the B-side of the “Ex-Con” 7-inch, and two songs from the Floating EP.

Supper was the tenth Smog album. Callahan plays guitar, Hammond organ and piano, and produced it, with Sarabeth Tucek on vocals, Andy Hopkins on guitar, Ken Champion on pedal steel and piano, Ryan Hembrey on bass and cello, Nate Lepine on a wind controller, and Jim White on drums, with Rian Murphy on drums on one song. Jeremy Lemos recorded it.

Metacritic’s average of 15 reviews is 79, “generally favorable”, and No Ripcord placed it 39th on its list of the top 50 albums of 2003.

A River Ain’t Too Much to Love is the eleventh Smog album and Callahan’s last under the name. He had wanted to release it under his own name, but decided against it after pressure from Drag City. Joanna Newsom plays piano on “Rock Bottom Riser” and Thor Harris of Shearwater plays zills and hammer dulcimer; it was mastered at Abbey Road. There were music videos for “Rock Bottom Riser” and “I Feel Like the Mother of the World”, the second with the actress Chloë Sevigny.

Metacritic’s average of 29 reviews is 76, “generally favorable”. Gil Scott-Heron covered “I’m New Here”, and used it as the title of his final album.

Woke on a Whaleheart was the first record Callahan released under his own name instead of Smog. He explained the change: “I realized that [Smog is] a really ugly word. I realized I’d been going so many years without even thinking about it. I realized I didn’t want to be associated with this thing that doesn’t even exist. Because a name is a pretty strong thing, right?”. A single, “Diamond Dancer”, came out on March 20, 2007, ahead of the album.

The arrangements are by Neil Michael Hagerty, a Drag City labelmate and the former vocalist and guitarist of Royal Trux. Callahan’s band was the vocalist Deani Pugh-Flemmings, the guitarist Pete Denton, the violinist Elizabeth Warren, the percussionist Thor Harris, the bassist Steve Bernal and Howard Draper on keyboards and lap steel. Callahan said its sound touches on “gospel, tough pop and American Light Opera”. The artwork is by Joe Grillo of the art collective Dearraindrop.

Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle is the second album under his own name. John Congleton recorded it and Brian Beattie arranged it. Callahan told Uncut how it was made: he recorded the basic tracks with a band, then handed them to Beattie to write string and horn parts while he toured in South America and North America; when he came back they put on the overdubs “in an old fashioned way”, with four or five string players gathered around one microphone.

The basic band was people he had toured with: Jaime Zuverza on guitar, whose playing Beattie called “unmacho”, Luis Martinez on drums, and Bobby Weaver, a friend of Congleton, on bass. Reviews were very positive; Mojo named it the second best album of 2009, and in 2013 NME placed it at number 443 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

In 2010 Callahan released his first live album, Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, recorded in 2007 at The Toff in Melbourne, Australia.

The same year, in July, Drag City published his epistolary novel Letters to Emma Bowlcut.

Apocalypse is the third studio album under his own name and the fourteenth overall, counting the Smog LPs. John Congleton recorded it; Brian Beattie plays bass and mixed it, Matt Kinsey plays electric guitar and bass, Jonathan Meiburg piano and Wurlitzer, Neal Morgan drums, Gordon Butler fiddle and Luke Franco flute.

Mojo and Pitchfork both put it at number 23 on their lists of the best albums of 2011, and Uncut at 25. Sasha Frere-Jones called it “my favorite of Callahan’s albums, not because it has better songs — those are scattered among at least five others — but because it does exactly what he wants it to do: it conveys an album’s coherence.” In 2019 Pitchfork ranked it 39th in its “200 Best Albums of the 2010s”. A tour film of Callahan’s 2011 Apocalypse tour came out in 2012.

Callahan began writing Dream River in August 2012, with the idea of a record to listen to late at night. “[Dream River is] the last record you could listen to at the end of the day, before you go to bed, around midnight,” he said. “[I wanted it to be] smooth and relaxing, the perfect end to a person’s day.” It was also his chance to have more of a life while making a record: he said he usually dreaded going “into the abyss”, and wanted to see if he could do other things while making this one. “I pretty much did.”

Erik Wofford recorded it, and Brian Beattie mixed it. Matt Kinsey, Jamie Zuverza and Thor Harris play with him, and the front painting is Paul Ryan’s; the ink drawings are Callahan’s. It is his fourth album under his own name and the fifteenth overall, and it reached number 44 on the UK Albums Chart. Metacritic’s average of 33 reviews is 84, “universal acclaim”; Pitchfork gave it “Best New Music”, and Mojo, which called it his “most beguiling album yet” in a five-star review, named it the best album of 2013.

Have Fun with God is a dub-style remix of Dream River, mixed by the studio engineer Brian Beattie, who had also played on the original. Callahan spoke at the time of his love for 1970s dub mixing and music, calling it “pensive music and body music”, qualities he suggested are unappreciated in “this digital age”.

Reviews were mixed. Metacritic’s average of 16 reviews is 66; Pitchfork gave it 7.3 out of 10 and praised how “real-time” the dub mixing felt, and The Guardian gave it three stars out of five. Chad Parkhill of The Quietus found it unlike dub “in its traditional sense” and felt it “doesn’t make much sense as a standalone album”, while Paste’s Steve Labate found it “cosmic, Lynchian”.

In 2018 Callahan was featured in the Live at Third Man Records series, and the result was his second live album. It has songs from his previous three studio albums.

Another live recording, Resuscitate!, followed in 2024. Wikipedia’s discography page lists it and the biography page lists it among his albums as Bill Callahan; no page describes it, so this film says no more.

Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest ended a hiatus that began with the birth of Callahan’s son in 2015, when he considered quitting music because of the demands of being a parent. It is the sixth studio album under his own name and the seventeenth overall, a double album of twenty tracks and over sixty-three minutes, the longest he had made.

The album was announced on May 2, 2019, and its first three sides came out digitally in the weeks before the release, on May 23, May 30 and June 6, the day it began streaming on NPR’s First Listen. Metacritic’s average of 22 reviews is 88. Jayson Greene of Pitchfork called it “his warmest, his most generous, possibly his most profound” record, a “high note, fond and deep and sustained”, and Laura Snapes of The Guardian a “brilliantly sly celebration of family and the infinite”.

Gold Record was announced on June 25, 2020, and from June 29 a new single came out every week until the release date, each with a sketch Callahan drew while preparing for a Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest tour. It is the seventh studio album under his own name and the eighteenth overall. It is named after the RIAA Gold certification, and mostly holds old and unfinished songs, including a revisit of “Let’s Move to the Country”, the opening song of Knock Knock.

It was recorded in one week, with the guitarist Matt Kinsey, the bassist Jamie Zuverza and the drummer Adam Jones. Metacritic’s average of 15 reviews is 86, “universal acclaim”. Kitty Empire of The Guardian made it her album of the week, finding “one of music’s great about-turns, the undersung one-time misanthrope” releasing “an album abundant in warmth and empathy”.

During the COVID-19 pandemic Callahan and Will Oldham, who records as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, made a series of cover songs with several special guests and released them as videos on YouTube. They compiled the songs into the album Blind Date Party, a collaborative double album of covers of other artists’ songs with guest appearances, many of them from the pair’s Drag City labelmates.

Metacritic’s average of six reviews is 82, “universal acclaim”.

Ytilaer, stylised YTI⅃AƎЯ, is the eighth solo studio album under Callahan’s own name and, by the album’s page, his nineteenth overall counting Smog. Mark Nevers recorded it at Arlyn Studios in Austin, Texas, in January 2022, apart from “Drainface”, which Cooper Crain recorded at Estuary Recording in Austin in December 2021, and mixed it at Wire Recording in April 2022.

The title is “reality” backwards. Callahan said: “a few years ago I was doing some drawing and very casually wrote reality backwards – just like you see on the album – and I thought that could be something someday. It was when I made this record I realised it was the perfect time to use it.”

Metacritic’s average of 15 reviews is 87. Andrew Perry of Mojo gave it five stars and called it an “outright classic”; AllMusic’s Heather Phares wrote that it is “more exciting and engaging than his music has been in some time”.

My Days of 58 is the latest record the sources name. The biography page lists it as the eighth Bill Callahan album, released in “February/March 2026”, and Wikipedia’s discography page puts it in the table of his albums on Drag City with the date February 27, 2026. It has no Wikipedia page of its own, so the film says nothing more about it than that.

The sources date Ytilaer to 2022 and the live record Resuscitate! to 2024.