Gold Record

Album review

In 1999, at a time when he was a nervous wreck and singing under the name Smog, Bill Callahan opened his Knock Knock album with a song called Let's Move to the Country. It was about stopping travelling and moving to the country, “just you and me”. At the end of the song, two sentences were left strangely incomplete: “Let's start…/Let's have...”. Twenty years later, Callahan covered Let's Move to the Country on Gold Record, and he’s filled in the blanks: “Let's start a family / Let's have a baby / or maybe two / ooh ooh oooh”. In real life, he settled down and started a family. He anchored himself, tamed his anxiety and opened a new chapter in his very long discography. Bill Callahan’s albums have always been intense. But in the last couple of years they have become intensely peaceful. There’s no stylistic revolution on Gold Record: Callahan always harvests his songs in the field of Americana, between wasteland country and bluesy folk by the fireside. And what makes him unique and exciting belongs only to him: that dry, low voice that hasn’t changed since the first version of Let's Move to the Country, some unusual production details, lyrics like an existential diary inspired by everyday life experiences - one song about breakfast, another about neighbours, another about Ry Cooder. A touch of humour, too. For example, Bill Callahan begins the song Pigeons with the words “Hello, I'm Johnny Cash” and ends it with a “Sincerely, L. Cohen”. In his own way (lurking in the shadows and happy to be there), he has taken over from the two giants with Gold Record. © Stéphane Deschamps/Qobuz