On his 19th album (that’s 11 as Smog, and a further eight under his own name, stats fans) Bill Callahan continues his turn towards warm and lucid songwriting. The alt-country auteur who once sang about broken marriages and “teenage spaceships” is now far more likely to write a turn of phrase that melts your heart, rather than breaking it.
Like its title, which leaves little room for ambiguity, ‘My Days Of 58’ is among Callahan’s most overtly autobiographical albums. His lyrics have long been almost aggressively first-person in their perspective, but these 12 tracks feel like his least character-driven and most endearingly immersive work.
The raw clarity of these lyrics frequently borders on zen. Lonely City is a paean to his home in New York,while Highway Born reveals his philosophy of travel, allowing him to “take the temperature of the whole country.”
The music of ‘My Days of 58’ is similarly sparse and thoughtful. Here, Callahan has practically deconstructed the alt-country sound, reducing it down to its bare, expressive essentials.
West Texas is marked by quietly dramatic stops and starts, the lengthy Stepping Out To Air builds to a gorgeous, brass-filled climax, while And Dream Land is full of aptly off-kilter washy guitars and injections of saxophone.
It’s as though, as he’s begun to approach old age, Callahan has developed an increasingly sharp grasp of his own reality. Intriguingly, however, his music has only become more ambitious in that same period, adding up to an engrossing, gently complex and typically brilliant album.
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