Smog dissolves as Bill finds wider audience

Bill Callahan plays the Olympia in Dublin next month. When the American played a smaller venue, The Academy, a few years ago, it was packed, as was Whelan’s a few years before that, when Callahan made his last appearance under his alias, Smog.

The Olympia is associated with mainstream artists. Though Callahan has increased his profile in recent years, largely on the back of 2009’s stunning album, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, his audience seems to be ageing indie cognoscenti. Hopefully, the Olympia date indicates change.

Callahan should be embraced by a wider audience. An heir to Leonard Cohen, he’s everything a vocational songwriter should be — eloquent, curious, whimsical, and yet grounded, methodical, and committed to his craft. As a singer, he has a supple baritone that hides itself in a low rumble before soaring upwards.

As a lyricist, he is fascinated by the mystical in everyday human experience. Sometimes his songs concoct stories, but just as often Callahan, indebted to imagist poetry, plays with a single motif and teases out the sublime from the quotidian. Despite his great facility with language, his lyrics employ a spare vocabulary of extraordinary lyricism and feeling. His protagonists are longing for “a way to be free”, like the penitentiary inmates on a swimming excursion in his song, ‘River Guard.’ His characters often find sympathy in nature, and references to nature abound in his songs.

Callahan’s current album, Dream River, is another gem. Enlivened by ornate strings and mesmerising flute passages, it is awash in the languid, dream-state dynamics that mark Callahan’s recordings. Not that Callahan is one-note. His albums are eclectic, ranging from the lo-fi recordings that announced him in the mid-1990s to the jazz-textures that bubble beneath 2011’s Apocalypse. (As if to demonstrate the point, he’s just released a surprising set of dub remixes of Dream River).

The dominant aesthetic in his music is American roots and country and it was in the 1990s ‘new folk’ scene that he made his name. Callahan has been involved romantically with prominent musicians once associated with that scene, most notably Chan Marshall (Cat Power) and Joanna Newsom. But like Marshall’s, Callahan’s subtle experiments with sound make the folk tag tired.

Elsewhere, he has much in common with David Berman of Silver Jews, and Will Oldham (aka Bonnie Prince Billy), artists with whom he shared a record label — Drag City — in the 1990s. (Like Berman, a poet, Callahan published his debut novel, Letters to Emma Bowlcut, in 2010). In recent years, however, Callahan seems to have outstripped his peers, having honed his craft to an incredible degree and refined his artistic identity. However many people are talking about him these days, you suspect that number is only set to get larger as the years go by.

* Bill Callahan plays the Olympia on Feb 2