Live Review: Bill Callahan

Shortly after tones ring out over the heads of the crowd filling the Arts Centre foyer, announcing that Bill Callahan is about to take to the stage, the crowd inside the venue hushes. As latecomers hurry in, heads bowed, a four-piece assembles centrestage, and a spell is cast.

The man once known as Smog, with the help of the deft jazz drumming of Adam Jones, Brian Beattie’s electric double bass and Matt Kinsey’s textural electric guitar, sets about bringing his most recent, and most acclaimed album, Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest, to life. Opening with the welcome of Writing, “It sure feels good to be singing again/From the mountain and the mountain within,” the mood is confessional, sincere and often blackly comic. Callahan cuts an elegant figure on stage, his silver hair thick like a television host from the 1960s, his top shirt button remains fastened, his trousers belted high and his parlour acoustic guitar covers his breast. Befitting the effortlessness of his music, Callahan's rich baritone, the sound of a maple tree being slowly felled, is delivered to the audience through a sound system bent on capturing every syllable.

That the set features few songs from before Callahan’s hiatus from 2013 to 2019 speaks to how differently he is connecting to his songs in 2020. With many inspired by marriage, fatherhood, the death of a parent and a reassembled life that was no longer focused around music, songs now express dazzlement at domesticity. Over and over tonight, Callahan expresses a yearning for the simplicity of personal fulfilment. “Come with me to the country,” he sings, “Just you and me.” Or, “I'm just talking about the old days/Groundwork or footwork/Well, after this next song we'll get moving along.”

Behind these homely sentiments, the band fill the space like physical embodiments of Callahan’s mind, sinuously occupying higher frequencies with cymbal brushes or melodic guitar lines that grow from his strummed chords. The bass balloons through the room before vanishing to ensure not a lyric is missed, a quality that could only be born from rehearsals that move from the musical to the near-telepathic.

Older songs such as America and Too Many Birds are given freeform workouts. The first stretches out to allow Kinsey’s distorted guitar to spiral and heave as he pushes against Jones’ rhythms. The second is given an introduction in which Callahan tells us about his first 24 hours in Australia - time he spent asleep, feeling hungry, wandering the streets at night looking for food, and eating garlic toast. It's a story told slowly and invested with pathos, humour and warmth. It's also impossible to tell whether it is the product of meticulous rehearsal or improvisation.

Highlights of the night include a stunning rendition of his newer songs 747, Watch Me Get Married and Angela. Dips into his back catalogue include Drover, Riding For The Feeling and Seagull. So strong are these songs, and so gloriously are they rendered, that his best-known song, Jim Cain, and songs from his first dozen albums are barely missed. Even a cover of Leonard Cohen’s So Long, Marianne seems to become Callahan’s, its imagery – “You held on to me like I was a crucifix” – at home alongside lyrics such as, “Like motel curtains, we never really met/And cutting our losses is our best bet.”

Closing with The Beast, the final track on Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest, the band blend the sounds to rise and fall with what seems like a single tone. It's a moment that harks back to tonight's opening song and its refrain, ”Sometimes I have to wonder on/Where have all the good songs gone?”. Tonight, once the band has left the stage, the spell breaks, and a more reasonable question seems, how much merch can I afford?