Bill Callahan

Disaster

William Rahr Callahan was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, on 3 June 1966. His parents worked as language analysts for the National Security Agency. He was writing songs by about sixteen, and later said they were meant for nobody but himself. From 1988 he put out home recordings as Smog on his own cassette label, Disaster: Macrame Gunplay, Cow, A Table Setting and Tired Tape Machine, four-track tapes, many of them instrumental, whose lo-fi sound came from poor equipment rather than any aesthetic plan. The 1990 LP Sewn to the Sky caught the attention of Drag City in Chicago, which issued the Floating EP in August 1991 and has been his North American label ever since. Lou Barlow of Sebadoh was an early champion.

The Smog years

Smog was always Callahan plus whoever he was recording with, never a fixed band; Cynthia Dall sang with him in the early 1990s. After Forgotten Foundation (1992) came Julius Caesar (1993), his first record made in a professional studio, with Kim Osterwalder on cello. In 2022 he said it was the first record on which he thought every song was great. That December the Flaming Lips covered its Chosen One live in a Minneapolis record store. Wild Love (1995), the Kicking a Couple Around EP, with three tracks produced by Steve Albini, and The Doctor Came at Dawn (1996) followed, and Domino became his European label for the rest of the Smog years.

With Jim O'Rourke as producer and multi-instrumentalist came what Callahan calls a trilogy: Red Apple Falls (1997), Knock Knock (1999) and Dongs of Sevotion (2000). He had been living with Chan Marshall of Cat Power in a South Carolina farmhouse, and wrote Knock Knock in 1998 on the drive to Chicago after they split. It was cut in ten days with the drummers Thymme Jones and Tim Mulvenna, a string quartet and a children's choir, and he remembered the thrill of finally having a band. Pitchfork rated it 9.7. Its single Held was later covered by Spoon, and Cat Power recorded Red Apples.

Rain on Lens (2001) and Supper (2003) followed, along with the rarities set Accumulation: None (2002) and a December 2001 Peel session for the BBC, with Jim White on drums, that Drag City finally released in 2024. A River Ain't Too Much to Love (2005), made in Spicewood, Texas, with Joanna Newsom on piano for one song, was the last Smog album. He wanted his own name on it, but Drag City pushed back. Gil Scott-Heron later made its I'm New Here the title track of his final album.

Bill Callahan

Woke on a Whaleheart (2007) was his first album as Bill Callahan; he had come to see Smog as a really ugly word, he said. Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle (2009), recorded in Plano, Texas, with John Congleton, was Mojo's second album of the year. In 2010 came his first live album, Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, and a novel, Letters to Emma Bowlcut.

Apocalypse (2011) was written in his shed over two and a half months of long days, seven days a week, and recorded in September 2010 at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, with the guitarist Matt Kinsey and the drummer Neal Morgan. He called it a record about American music as much as anything else American. It opens with Drover and has Riding for the Feeling at its heart, the two songs he has played live more than any others. Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker called it his favorite Callahan album, and Pitchfork later ranked it 39th among the albums of the 2010s. Hanly Banks filmed the American leg of the tour, and she and Callahan married in 2014.

Later

Dream River (2013), recorded in Texas in January 2013, reached 44 in the UK, and a dub version, Have Fun with God, followed. After his son was born in 2015 he stepped away and thought about quitting music. In 2018 Netflix named its series Wild Wild Country after a line in Drover. He came back with Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest (2019), Gold Record (2020), Blind Date Party (2021), a pandemic covers series made with Will Oldham, and YTI⅃AƎЯ (2022). The live albums Resuscitate! (2024) and What a Night! (2025) catch his band with Jim White, Kinsey and the saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, and his 2024 London residency as a duo with White. My Days of 58 (2026) is his eighth album under his own name. He lives in Austin, Texas.