It takes Bill Callahan just a track or two on My Days of 58 to start a song with the first-person “I”. The song in question, “The Man I’m Supposed Be”, serves as a decent bellwether for the highly autobiographical material that surrounds it. Callahan, who murmured for much of the 1990s and 2000s under the moniker of Smog, has always written and sung about himself, both when performing solo and with collaborators.
The solitary “You Moved In”, which opened his Minimalist masterclass The Doctor Came at Dawn, fairly bluntly recounts romances gone askew. (To be fair, other corners of that melancholy tract also linger on the topic.) Autobiography looms large elsewhere, too, from “Bathysphere”, a decidedly lighter tune Callahan released an eternity ago on 1995’s Wild Love, to 2005’s “Rock Bottom Riser”, which begins with this rather matter-of-fact stanza: “I love my mother / I love my father / I love my sisters, too / I bought this guitar / To pledge my love / To pledge my love to you.”
Callahan most definitely reprises some familiar themes on My Days of 58 – from constructing a simulacrum of one’s self through songwriting (“Pathol O.G.”) to the weight of depression (“Stepping Out for Air”, which references both “tufted Lexapro” and “Zoloft pines”) to the knots of family and the tug of parental inheritance (“Empathy”). Ultimately, a listener’s feelings about the degree to which Callahan inserts himself into the narratives that drive his songs will really dictate opinions of the LP. My Days of 58 is a good record, but, as Callahan and Smog go, it’s more of an interesting LP than a great one.
Bill Callahan, of course, has lots of tricks up his sleeve here. The aforementioned (and excellent) “The Man I’m Supposed to Be” is most notable for how the now-Texas-based singer-songwriter juxtaposes dissonant, often jarring guitar notes with highly melodic phrasing in the song’s bridges and its earworm of a chorus. It’s a trope Callahan pulls off pretty masterfully and seemingly effortlessly, but it’s also a rarity here, one he doesn’t keep rolling out on his first LP since 2022.
What’s more interesting and emblematic about that song in particular, though, is how hard Callahan leans into crafting the latest chapters in his decades-long persona. The song overflows with the latest details from the Callahan canon about romantic entanglement. However, while past offerings and deep cuts like “I Break Horses”, say, or “To Be of Use” were fascinating glimpses into sexual psychology, My Days of 58 seems more resigned to deal with the dusty and often well-trodden themes of late-middle age: maturity, responsibility, the weight of carrying family trees on your shoulders. It’s greying Bill Callahan, husband, father, descendant, as he exists in the Year of Our Lord Twenty and Twenty-Six.
Listeners don’t need to struggle much to catch the themes and the details Callahan scatters throughout. The 12-track record overflows with citations for the thesis. Sometimes, they’re more literal than literary. He talks about his two kids on “Empathy,” but the song is largely an open letter to his Dad. “You said you got by without a father, so you figured why should I have one /Okay, okay, it made me wonder though /
Can you get by without a son?”
In “Highway Born”, he offers his two cents on the trials and travails of touring. Elsewhere, the themes (thankfully) are colored with poetic devices.“I saw that demon inside me / Trying to claim my body as its own,” Callahan deadpans in that familiar baritone as the aforementioned “The Man I’m Supposed to Be” opens.“Invader, enslaver, little headstone /Tell me, has it grown?” Misreading the tea leaves? Even the LP’s title references Callahan’s efforts to document his current mise-en-scene.
The songs are loose-limbed, sometimes jangly things, with the threads stitching together various parts feeling not just casual but almost inadvertent. A lot of credit here goes to Bill Callahan’s instinctive give-and-take with drummer Jim White, but it’s hard to dismiss the roles of others here, especially a YTILAER-era tourmate like guitarist Matt Kinsey. In some spots, the record feels a little uneven, a little lumpy. In “Computer”, Callahan’s playfulness can feel awkward, almost clumsy. The closer “The World Is Still” tries to cash in on dreaminess and ethereal swells of sound, but it never follows through on its promises. It aspires to Smog closers like “Hangman’s Blues”, but lacks those tracks’ concepts or pathos.
However, there are, no doubt, really magical moments here. “Stepping Out For Air” feels otherworldly, somehow both glassy and silk-spun. Some of the lyrics Callahan unfurls are a little on the nose: “I watched the sky turn from blue to grey / I think I’m going to rain today.” The cautious way the various pieces of the songs are woven together – a sometimes-playful bass, twinkling piano notes, steady exhalations from a horn section – feels like an oddly welcoming invitation to soak in the scenery.
“And Dream Land”, the second-to-last track, is direct, even forceful or propulsive, by comparison. There are a lot of moving parts, and the song finally delivers on the electric and slide guitars that have hesitantly been entering the frame here and there. “Lonely City”, with its shuffling acoustic serving as balladeering backdrop, is heart-aching in a way only Callahan seems to know. (The chorus, where Callahan is joined by a backing female vocalist, emotive strings and occasional interjections of heavily reverb-treated guitar, might be the best thing here.)
Can listeners come to expect My Days of 59, My Days of 60, My Days of 61 and more from one of Gen X’s most prolific songsmiths of the morose variety? Hard to say. The over/under suggests betting on Callahan’s commitment to autobiography is a solid one. On My Days of 58, there are moments where the approach pays dividends. In the end, though, it leaves the latest entry in Bill Callahan’s ever-expanding discography feeling more interesting than inspired.