'I Was Very Into Solitude' - An Audience With Bill Callahan

At the end of his most successful year to date, the one-time Smog loner talks children’s choirs, Scorsese films, tabloid nudity and why he’d rather be a horse than a bird

- Sam Richards

FROM the garden of a rented house in Austin, Texas – his own home, a few blocks away, is currently being decorated – perennial outsider Bill Callahan is recuperating from the shock of having just headlined Hammersmith Apollo, one of the biggest venues he’s ever played. “I’m always surprised that anyone comes,” he says hesitantly, the modesty clearly not a put-on. “When you get to a venue, you do the soundcheck, you might go for a walk, and then you come into the separate artist entrance which is usually in a back alley. The theatre’s been empty all day, and then you come out on stage and suddenly there’s people there – a lot of people!”

Callahan admits that often it’s a struggle to make that journey back to the stage. “When you get to a club you wonder, ‘How can I do this again?’ But once the people are there, it’s kind of an alchemical reaction where everything fits into place. I think an unusual thing about my trajectory is that the audience has gotten slightly bigger from the start, in very small increments – another couple of hundred people every few years. For me, that’s a pretty cool thing. I definitely don’t take it for granted.”

There was a surprise, too, in the mood and subject matter of 2019’s acclaimed Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest. Three decades after his first claustrophobic, lo-fi experiments under the Smog banner, via the twisted country fables he fashioned with producer Jim O’Rourke and the expansive vistas of his first few solo albums, Callahan has found the walls closing in again – except this time it’s on a scene of relative domestic bliss with his wife and young son.