{"id":445463,"date":"2026-02-25T21:28:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T21:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/445463\/"},"modified":"2026-02-25T21:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T21:28:09","slug":"bill-callahan-laughs-at-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/445463\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Callahan Laughs at Death"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cLife, human life, is my main interest,\u201d Bill Callahan<\/a> said recently over a Zoom call from his backyard studio in Austin, Texas. \u201cIt\u2019s not technology or football or whatever, it\u2019s just human psychology.\u201d An hour-long conversation with the 58-year-old musician bears that out. Over the past 30-odd years, Callahan has distinguished himself as one of America\u2019s great singer-songwriters, with a probing eye for detail and an acidic wit, but it\u2019s easy to imagine that had one or two biographical details gone differently\u2014had he not returned to the guitar after quitting it as a teenager, or never picked up the four-track recorder upon which he recorded his scabrous early noise tapes as Smog<\/a>\u2014he might instead have blossomed into a novelist, or perhaps an ethnographer. But a singer is what he became\u2014a vocation he interrogates, in habitually eagle-eyed terms, on \u201cWhy Do Men Sing,\u201d the reverently country-fried opener of his new album, My Days of 58, in which a white-robed Lou Reed, subbing in for heavenly keymaster Saint Peter, teaches him the secret of life.<\/p>\n

Back in his days writing knotty indie-rock character studies, Callahan once had the reputation of being difficult to interview, but over the past decade or so, something changed. He\u2019s hardly a garrulous sort, but these days he\u2019s open about his own life in a way that he once wasn\u2019t. And while you still get the sense that he doesn\u2019t suffer fools easily\u2014in a public interview at Krakow\u2019s Unsound festival a couple of years ago, he shot down my clumsy attempt at an opening joke with a pitying look that made me want to disappear right there and then\u2014the man who once described himself as a teenage spaceship<\/a>, hovering just out of reach of mere mortals, has clearly warmed to his fellow humans. The lengthy pauses in his answers once seemed designed to unsettle clueless interlocutors, but these days he deploys them, more often than not, for comic relief.<\/p>\n

Long averse to discussing his own life, whether in song or for a reporter\u2019s notebook, Callahan opened up with his 2019 album Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest<\/a>, a chronicle of the ways that fatherhood and marriage had reshaped him, and he\u2019s been on a roll ever since. His latest album, My Days of 58, might be his most candid yet. He takes an unsparing look at his relationship with his late father, confronts his own self-professed failings as a husband and dad, and comes clean about the times he\u2019s used his guitar as a shield to protect himself from other people.<\/p>\n

Yet musically, it\u2019s among the most unburdened sounding records in his catalog, full of lilting acoustic guitars and buoyant horn charts\u2014he calls it a living-room record, but it also feels like a road record, custom-made for flying down the interstate he declares his affection for on \u201cHighway,\u201d one of the sweetest love songs of his career.<\/p>\n

Both those aspects\u2014the self-searching and the sense of freedom\u2014stemmed from an unexpected piece of news he received a little over a year ago, when lab tests came back with troubling results. That diagnosis led directly to \u201cThe Man I\u2019m Supposed to Be,\u201d and its shout-it-from-the-rooftops refrain: \u201cWe take life seriously\/Laugh in the face of death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pitchfork: Last time we spoke, in late 2024, you said something to the effect that you\u2019d been experimenting with not writing songs for a while. Was there a time between the last album and the new one where you were intentionally not writing music?<\/p>\n

Bill Callahan: It was a very brief time and I was joking a little bit, but lately I\u2019ve been thinking I could do so much more. It used to be so all-encompassing and satisfying just to make a record every year or whatever. I guess I toured a lot more when I was younger, and that took up a lot of time. Lately I\u2019m thinking I could do more. Either make more records more frequently\u2014which is kind of discouraged by the press, really, because they don\u2019t want to write about you too often, but I don\u2019t really care about that; I mean, sometimes I\u2019ll make a record and they don\u2019t want to write about it anyway\u2014or doing something else in addition to music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cLife, human life, is my main interest,\u201d Bill Callahan said recently over a Zoom call from his backyard…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":445464,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,6410,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-445463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-qa","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/445464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}