Bill Callahan (musician)
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Bill Callahan (born approximately 1968 or 1969), also known as Smog and (Smog), is an American singer-songwriter born in Silver Spring, Maryland. Callahan began working in the lo-fi genre of underground rock, with home-made tape-albums recorded on four track tape recorders. Later he began releasing albums with the label Drag City.
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[edit] Work
Callahan started out as a highly experimental artist, utilizing sub-standard instruments and recording equipment. His song writing during this time was often characterized by a near total lack of melodic structure or repetition as well as clumsily played and out of tune guitars (possibly influenced by Jandek of whom Callahan is an admirer), accounting for the highly dissonant sounds on his self-released cassettes and debut album Sewn to the Sky. In addition much of his early output was instrumental, a stark contrast to the lyrical focus of his later work. His reason for using the lo-fi approach was not so much an aesthetic choice, rather it came from his lack of desire to work in recording studios, and fear of giving up control to sound engineers.
Between the years of 1993-2000, one could track Callahan's recorded output as it grew more and more "professional" sounding--utilizing more instruments and a generally higher sound quality. In this period he recorded two albums with the influential producer Jim O'Rourke, Tortoise's John McEntire, as well as collaborating with the similar-minded Neil Hagerty. After 2000's Dongs of Sevotion, Smog began moving back to a slightly simpler instrumentation and recording style, as on the albums Rain on Lens, Supper, and A River Ain't Too Much to Love.
Smog's songs are often based on simple, repetitive structures, often consisting of a simple chord progression repeated for the duration of the entire song and his singing is strikingly characterized by his baritone vocal and a style of delivery free of over emoting. Melodically and lyrically he tends to eschew the verse-chorus approach favoured by many contemporary song writers, preferring instead a more free form approach relying less on melodic and lyrical repetition. Themes in Callahan's lyrics include relationships, moving, horses, teenagers, bodies of water, and more recently, politics. Smog's generally dispassionate delivery of lyrics and dark irony often obfuscate complex emotional and lyrical twists and turns. Critics have generally characterized his music as depressing and intensely introverted, with one critic describing it as "a peep-show view into an insular world of alienation." [1] Despite this there is also a broad swathe of joy throughout Callahan's work and more attentive critics have picked up on Callahan's tendency to black humour, a tendency often confused with a depressed mental state or a genuine obsession with the morbid, a confusion no doubt caused by his deadpan vocals. He is a keen storyteller using simple words to project large and deeply echoing tales.
He currently resides in Austin, TX where he is recording the follow-up to A River Ain't Too Much to Love, currently titled Awoke on a Whaleheart and scheduled to be released in April 2007.[1] It will be his first record release as Bill Callahan. In 2006, he also began touring under his full name.[2]
[edit] Discography
 (LP on Disaster) |
 (CD on Drag City) |
 (LP/CS/CD on Drag City) |
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 (LP/CD on Drag City) |
 (LP/CD on Drag City) |
 (LP/CD on Drag City) |
 (2xLP/CD on Drag City) |
 September 18, 2001 |
 (LP/CD on Drag City) |
[edit] Notes
- ^ myspace.com/toomuchtolove, retrieved 29 November 2006
- ^ atpfestival.com, retrieved 29 November 2006
[edit] Sources and external links
As a collaboration project the two German labels Schinderwies Productions and keplar released a split single subtitled "a tribute to smog" in 2003. Tripophon(schinderwies) and Radio Magenta (keplar) contributed their versions of "I Was a Stranger" and "Ex-Con" from the "Red Apple Falls"-album.
