“Life, human life, is my main interest,” Bill Callahan said recently over a Zoom call from his backyard studio in Austin, Texas. “It’s not technology or football or whatever, it’s just human psychology.” 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’s great singer-songwriters, with a probing eye for detail and an acidic wit, but it’s easy to imagine that had one or two biographical details gone differently—had 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—he might instead have blossomed into a novelist, or perhaps an ethnographer. But a singer is what he became—a vocation he interrogates, in habitually eagle-eyed terms, on “Why Do Men Sing,” 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.
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’s hardly a garrulous sort, but these days he’s open about his own life in a way that he once wasn’t. And while you still get the sense that he doesn’t suffer fools easily—in a public interview at Krakow’s 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—the man who once described himself as a teenage spaceship, 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.
Long averse to discussing his own life, whether in song or for a reporter’s notebook, Callahan opened up with his 2019 album Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, a chronicle of the ways that fatherhood and marriage had reshaped him, and he’s 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’s used his guitar as a shield to protect himself from other people.
Yet musically, it’s among the most unburdened sounding records in his catalog, full of lilting acoustic guitars and buoyant horn charts—he 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 “Highway,” one of the sweetest love songs of his career.
Both those aspects—the self-searching and the sense of freedom—stemmed 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 “The Man I’m Supposed to Be,” and its shout-it-from-the-rooftops refrain: “We take life seriously/Laugh in the face of death.”
Pitchfork: Last time we spoke, in late 2024, you said something to the effect that you’d 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?
Bill Callahan: It was a very brief time and I was joking a little bit, but lately I’ve 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’m thinking I could do more. Either make more records more frequently—which is kind of discouraged by the press, really, because they don’t want to write about you too often, but I don’t really care about that; I mean, sometimes I’ll make a record and they don’t want to write about it anyway—or doing something else in addition to music.
