Bill Callahan
Philadelphia Record Exchange
1524 Frankford Ave.
Philadelphia
March 29, 2026
Here is the word from a subatomic physicist: “Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves... The particles are broken; the waves are translucent, laving, roiling with beauty like sharks. The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles."
(Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
it’s only the sea, with its incomparable ache,
that may categorically assert
the river is a wave that never breaks
(Paul Mundoon, “The River is a Wave”)
Well, I can tell you about the river
Or we could just get in
(Bill Callahan, “From the Rivers to the Ocean”)
Unsurprisingly, it was an incomparable joy to see Bill Callahan sing up close and personal, and, fittingly, his most recent material is as up-close-and-personal as he’s ever allowed his listeners to get to him in song: the lyrics on new album My Days of 58 deal with fatherhood, his parents, marriage, his real feelings about his real life. Sure, they’re artfully crafted and there’s jokes and rhymes and wit (and more than plenty left out, left private), but he’s admitted as much in interviews discussing the new album. Why now? Maybe it’s just his brush with death – a cancerous tumor he had removed – or the general apocalyptic feeling in the air these days; as one of our all-time most mercurial and evasive songwriters once put it: “Let us not speak falsely now / The hour is getting late.”
The songs themselves said it best. The monologue of set-and-album highlight “Pathol O.G.” began, as he strummed his open-C-tuned Harmony guitar at the 12th-fret harmonic: “You know, I've been writing songs / And singing them for nigh on thirty years / I like it / I love it! / It started out as a way for me to communicate / With other people, and myself / And the spirits / I don't want to say that it saved my life / But it gave me a life.” It would take a special cynic, or someone with a real rhetorical ax to grind, to dismiss or avoid the obvious here: Callahan is singing right to us here, about himself, and at least for now, the old metaphors won’t do the trick quite like saying it straight.
The songs elicited enough hearty, audible laughs that I felt like I was at Marty Supreme on opening weekend or something; indie rock audiences can be tricked by full-band presentation into thinking that funny songs are gravely serious, and fortunately that wasn’t the case, our collective guards down, relaxed in the moment. He played only new songs, giving us most of My Days of 58, nothing radically reimagined, just unvarnished, stripped back: Callahan talked of going for an in-the-room feeling while tracking the album, and it doesn’t get more in-the-room than what this short tour of record stores is offering. In the set-opening “Why Do Men Sing?” (discussed previously), Callahan recounted a comforting run-in with Lou Reed in a dream:
Lou Reed was waiting for me
All dressed in white
I said, "Lou, Lou, Lou, Lou, Lou, LouLou, Lou, Lou, Lou, Lou
What is this place that you took me to?”...
He looked me deep in the eye
And gave me that warm handshake
And said, "It's cool, baby, just got to let it ride
It's cool, little mama
Let it ride, let it ride, let it ride, let it ride…
Into a dwarf star or a black hole
Or someone else's soul"
I shot back through time to the night I first saw Callahan in the flesh, at the Aladdin Theater in Portland, Oregon, thirteen years ago; Lou Reed had died mere weeks before. Thirteen years gone. I watched Callahan and his band play a cover of “White Light/White Heat” from the balcony. Back in the present tense, I was watching Callahan in the bright light of day, singing a song at least thirteen years – and two brushes with death, one final – in the making. There’s a dedication in the new album’s liner notes: “Thanks to my wife, Hanly, and the kids – without whom a house would just be a hotel. And thanks to the angels.” With songs like these, songs that bring us face to face with those old spirits, it's easy to tell he means it.
