While Callahan once compared his musical ambitions to window shopping - something he could only fantasize about from the outside - his songs were now bold and confident and wide open like country roads. He seemed to be making up for lost time with records that bent to his every whim - string arrangements, children’s choirs - without abandoning the rawness that characterized his early work. (He claimed to have not heard Leonard Cohen until critics started comparing them.) Arriving between 1997’s breakthrough Red Apple Falls and 2000’s sprawling Dongs Of Sevotion, Knock Knock was the heart of Bill Callahan’s collage phase. He discovered what would soon become the defining principles of his sound - a grainy, homemade strain of folk music that seemed connected to the past without ever sounding reverential.
Knock knock song full#
His second and final album made with the aid of Jim O’Rourke and his first featuring a full band, Knock Knock was a leap forward for Callahan the musician. Now, he “loomed so large on the horizon,” glowing “beautiful with all my lights.” On a previous album, Callahan might have related more to the folks inside, asleep or oblivious to the imagined invasion happening just outside their windows. In “Teenage Spaceship,” Callahan is a kid walking through his sleepy hometown at night, imagining himself enormous, soaring over all the quiet houses. There’s the pensive narrator of “River Guard,” a prison guard who watches his inmates go for a swim and contemplates the metaphor within the context of his own life.
It’s largely an album about escape, however momentary or superficial, reflecting a childhood spent in constant flux due to his parents’ jobs with the National Security Agency. On Knock Knock, Callahan began looking outside, and his stories gained momentum. Without beginnings, endings, or context to fill us in, these passing images burrow in the subconscious like wrong texts from someone lonelier and more desperate (and way funnier) than us. In another, he collects his ex’s stray belongings and arranges them just-so on his bedroom floor.
In one song, a man listens to AC/DC and does several dozen push-ups in a motel room. His best songs from this period - the earliest of which were crudely recorded, sloppily performed, and rarely consisting of more than just a few words - are characterized by insularity: private moments he took devilish joy in capturing for eternity.
Breathe.īy the time he released Knock Knock, Bill Callahan had already been recording music for a decade. What does true companionship look like? Where do I find peace in this world? How can I be productive while acknowledging the joke that is existence? His answers mostly arrive in his delivery, a voice that’s grown deeper and truer with every record he’s made. After abandoning the Smog pseudonym to release music under his own name starting in 2007, his records have focused on the thorny questions that accompany getting older. In the two decades since the release of Knock Knock, Bill Callahan has been increasingly acclaimed for his refined exploration of adult concerns. “They wanted to see me sing,” he explained. The way Callahan told it at the time, he didn’t record in the booth with the selected members of the Chicago Children’s Choir, whose giddy voices accompany his drawled, deadpan musings in “No Dancing” and “Hit The Ground Running.” Instead, the 30-something songwriter stood just outside the glass partition, mouthing along. At the end of the 1990s, Bill Callahan gathered a small group of children to sing along with two songs for his new “album for teenagers,” Knock Knock.
0 kommentar(er)
