How do I introduce Bill Callahan? The American singer-songwriter is an artist that has been on my wish list to interview since becoming RUSSH’s Music Editor four years ago (a fact I embarrassingly divulged to his management in a bid to secure some of his time). I have shared his songs with friends and lovers to express some of life’s most meaningful moments, where my own words faltered. Perhaps, he is best introduced with the more common epithet of ‘Father of gothic American folk’? Beginning his career as Smog (primary moniker he took from 1988 to 2005, known for lo-fi, introspective indie rock/folk), Callahan is many artists within an artist, and as an entity, almost turns himself inside out conceptually through time –, from the hostile interiority of his early records to the wider ethical, domestic and ultimately metaphysical field of vision.

Perhaps driven by youth, his early Smog records felt carnal and claustrophobic, an emerging voice with a fractured sense of self accompanied by distortion within the production. He spoke on desire, compulsion and sabotaged intimacy, yet always with humour and wit. However, as Smog developed, the vision widened – perhaps with the record, A River Ain’t Too Much To Love – and we left the wine-stained bedrooms and moved into universal observations of self-surveillance. We mounted horses and rode through broader records and the physical world; the sublime that fascinated the Romantics started to become a focus for Callahan. And as his artistic arc continued, the American open road led to his own interpretations of domesticity, fatherhood, time and a non-doctrinal spirituality. Romantic partnership appeared not as salvation but as steadiness; domestic life became a place of seriousness rather than retreat. More recently, his writing has turned toward metaphysics, reincarnation, vibration, and cycles of return, alongside a growing unease with abstraction, automation, and the erosion of tactile life.

For someone who has a tendency to speak quickly when nervous or excited, speaking to Callahan required a change of pace. On our call, he speaks slowly, deliberately – quietly seismically – and with consideration. It almost feels like he is visualising the quote on the page before the question has been answered.

I was told that for many years that Callahan would only do written interviews which, given the significance of his lyrical prowess, figures. From his home in Texas, our conversation begins with some discussions on heavy weather which, although it seems like a predictably innocuous way to start a conversation, felt fitting as we began to talk about one of his more recent singles Stepping Out for Air from the new record My Days of 58, which harbours the line: “I watched the sky change from blue to gray, I think I’m going to rain today.”

Callahan explains that the Texans are not used to the cold snow he grew up with in Maryland, and so might be prepping for some kind of apocalypse with empty grocery stores. Although this is seemingly small talk, meteorology is metaphorically relevant.

With the release of his latest record My Days of 58, Callahan seems not to fear the reception or dissemination of it now that it is out in the world. Whilst some other artists fear to take this incredibly private, child-like creation and subject it to scrutiny, for Callahan, it has been a positive experience.

“It always feels good to release any record, just because it’s something you’ve been germinating for months and months as a solitary type of experience,” he tells me. “Then, you know, you show it to the band, and then the few people know it, and then it goes out into the world. It always feels good when it’s going to be out there for people.”

“It always feels good to release any record, just because it’s something you’ve been germinating for months and months, as a solitary type of experience.”

I noted that there seems to be reverence and gratitude rather than concern for the reception of his art. “I’m always surprised. I’m very surprised that people still care about what I do. I’ve been doing it for 30-whatever years, and it’s pretty amazing. So, if anybody listens, I’m happy. But really, the best thing is mostly about the creation itself, that’s my thing.”

“And,” Callahan adds, “the good thing about releasing a record is that you’re literally releasing it from your brain, and then you can move on to something else.” I posit that it’s almost like a cerebral jailbreak, to which he agrees: “It’s permission to start working on something else.”

There’s a romance in that too, not the romance of completion, but of continuation, a love affair with the next thing. The devotion to returning, again and again, to the state of making. I’m curious about the notion of permission to create, whether he ever has to grant it to himself, especially after becoming a parent. It’s a question I’ve heard countless female artists forced to answer, as though creativity is a luxury they must justify after becoming a Mother. Yet Callahan is almost perturbed by the premise. “No– it’s so natural to me, you know? It’s just one of the functions of my day, like eating or drinking water or exercise... it’s one of my basic necessities,” he says. “There’s just no question. I just can’t survive without it.”

The sheer volume of albums he has released is testament to this alone, but I remember reading somewhere that the guitar was his greatest drug, which leads us into the Brian Wilson-esque world of Good Vibrations.

Callahan has been reading about quantum theory. As the kind of artist who moves through the world with a mind always open, he speaks about instruments not as tools, but almost as portals. “It’s all about the vibration,” he says. “The more that I read about quantum theories lately, it’s that everything that we see is a vibration, you know? Having an instrument where you can make that vibration, it always feels like communicating with something higher. I’m communicating with everything without even trying. You just play it, play an open string, and then anybody can do that…” It is as though plucking a string is the simplest act revealing the architecture of everything.

When I ask whether this focus is new, he answers with the quiet intensity of someone who has been ruminating on this question for years. Callahan admits he tends to get fixated on certain topics, and that, along with vibrations, he’s absorbed by the notion of people as spiritual entities. “It’s not so much the earthly or spiritual entities on Earth, you know…” He describes the shift like an internal weather change. Once, he says, he was more interested in “what it’s like to be a human facing the problems that we’ve made for ourselves.” Now he’s pulled toward the bigger proposition: what we are beyond the earthly. What we carry and what we return to.

Callahan then proceeds to educate me on holograms: “There are different theories – like that everything is just a hologram. And I also found out that every hologram, if you take a tiny chunk of it, contains the entirety of the hologram in that little chunk.” Much like cloning from a single strand of hair, there is a digital DNA – one fragment can contain an entire identity. A greater writer than I might be able to draw some interesting comparisons on how this translates into lines within songs, or songs within records.

As the conversation moves into reincarnation, a theme discussed in the track Coyotes on My Days of 58. Callahan draws the conversation from there through to a book, Many Lives, Many Masters, and from there into the strange intimacies of parenthood: how children appear like familiar strangers; how their personalities arrive as if they’ve been living somewhere else before they landed here.

“I really started to believe in reincarnation at that point. And I hadn’t ever really believed it, but more and more things were pointing me in that direction. Especially like having kids. I realised this kid looks a little bit like me, and a bit like my wife, but their behaviour is not from me, or my wife. Kids are born with this personality, like fully formed…”

It’s this tangent that reveals Callahan’s startlingly direct romanticism surrounding reincarnation. “I do believe that we probably fall in love with the same person over and over again through generations. You know, that's why there's ‘the one’, there's the one seat. There are people you shouldn't have been with when you were 17, 18, 19 years old, you know? But then you finally find ‘the one’ and you get married. So, what is ‘the one’? It's got to mean something more than just like, oh, yeah, this person suits me. There's more to it, I think.”

When I ask him about “the repeated person,” the idea of the same love returning through generations, he answers with a simplicity that makes it feel less like a theory and more like a memory. “Yeah, I think that’s what you’re searching for when you come back to earth. You’re searching for that old love.”

I could have left the call there and spent the day musing on whether every archetypal couple from myth and history were the same beings reimagined in their time, but that would be a little short-sighted when there was so much more to learn. I’m curious to know whether writing his epistolary novella, Letters to Emma Bowlcut, required a different approach to his lyricism. Callahan confirms that it is a very different process, one that felt more conversational in a way, and though he has plans to write another book, music keeps “sucking [him] back in.” Music provides additional chapters in the process of recording, releasing and touring so appears to have a more magnetic appeal.

We talk about how songs find their way onto albums, how some are ghosts that don’t fit until, suddenly, they do. And then about notebooks, the private archives of a life in language. Callahan still goes back through old notebooks, opening one from 15 years ago to see what the past version of himself left behind.

“That’s one of my favorite ways of working, is the kind of randomness of that. I want to open up this notebook from a decade ago, see what the hell I wrote in there, and if I do think something is possibly good, I'll circle it so that it’s easier to find.”

One could argue that this return to self contributes to the unifying throughline of Callahan’s lyricism – that whilst maturing is inevitable, some elements of our past find their way into our present. I joke that my partner, who has been in Callahan’s touring party in the past, has made me swear to burn his notebooks if he dies, and that he is upstairs having surrealist dreams of women courting Jeff Bezos.

Dreams are an area of fascination for Callahan, which is unsurprising as they hold a similar, inexplicable mysticism as his reincarnation theory. He asks: “I mean, how can you not be interested in that? You know, we still don’t even really know what they are. For a long time, they said, ‘Oh, it’s just your brain sorting out information of the day’. But it’s not that… they’re not organised. I really hope that we figure some things out before I die. I really want to know what dreams are and where they're coming from. And who's sending them?” I ask him if, technology permitting, he would let someone record his dreams? “Sure,” he agrees. “I got nothing to hide.”

The portrait I have been painting thus far of Callahan is one of a true and very serious artist, a romantic with a curious mind, but perhaps what heightens the romanticism in his work is the humour that is juxtaposed within his lyricism. Were it not deployed with such skill, it could undermine his exploration of the human universals, but it is this fine balance with which it is deployed that adds severity. Dress Sexy At My Funeral is a great case study for this, a genuinely beautiful love song to his future widow, where he asks her during the eulogy to tell the crowd about their sex on the beach and how he gave to charity.

For Callahan, humour is non-negotiable. “Well, I mean, have you ever met a humourless person? They're no fun to hang out with. No matter how many interesting things they have to say, if a person has no sense of humour, they’re just no fun.”

Yet Callahan does not wield humour as a defence mechanism to make himself seem less pretentious, or to hide the truth. Instead, he feels “it opens up your heart. And I think when your heart is opened by laughter, then also it expands. It can absorb more heavy, heavy things.” He explains that humour is his “go-to for conversing… Why not laugh or try to make people laugh, you know? It doesn't mean you're a clown, you can still get the best, serious messages across, but my baseline is humour, so it makes sense that it's in my songwriting. I'm not going to throw that out the window.”

“No matter how many interesting things they have to say, if a person has no sense of humour, they’re just no fun.”

We talk about artists who make him laugh: Randy Newman, Mark E. Smith, the way a song can be both amusing and unsettling, the way humour can sharpen rather than soothe.

As a fan of the artists I am lucky enough to interview, I always am keen to know the sources of their inspiration and who they have seen or read lately. I try to conceal my jealousy when Callahan tells me he recently saw Modern Lovers frontman Jonathan Richman play.

After the birth of Callahan’s first child, there was the possibility of him no longer writing or performing. However, the age-old adage of ‘write what you know’ seems to have been a salve for the artist. “had, kind of a dry period when my son was born,” he tells me. “The only way through was to write about being a Father.”

He talks about fatherhood changing across generations and how he perceives the parental roles have moved closer together, as well as the pragmatic reality of trying to write music when your baby is crying in the house. He “wasn’t at an office downtown” and then escaping to a bar, his presence within the home became the source of inspiration.

The conversation then turns briefly to touch on the role of cinema as inspiration, and even his psychedelic experience with the final scenes of Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-nominated Hamnet.

“I don’t know how it influences me, if anything,” he begins. “It just recharges my battery and restores my faith in creation, I think.” I am somewhat compelled to broach the idea of AI and art. On My Days of 58, one of the tracks has the refrain, “I’m not a robot”, suggesting that this technology is not something Callahan embraces. However, unlike some artists who see AI as a threat, are terrified or contemptuous, Callahan’s rejection is based in grief. “The major feeling I have is sadness – that people are even going to entertain this idea of using this technology. Technology, for the most part, is supposed to make things better and easier, but it makes things worse and harder for the most part, you know? I think AI is kind of foisted on us. People maybe don’t even really want it, but when you get a new browser, it's like, ‘Hey, we're going to throw in AI for free on new computers! No, I don't want it. Nobody's going to buy it, so they're giving it out for free.” He continues: “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.”

It is hard to speak to the American Poet Laureate and not note the political climate of the hour. “I'm really into the idea of living small,” he tells me. “All I need, all anybody needs to do, is take care of yourself, your family, your friends, your neighborhood, your neighbours. If everybody did that, it'd be heaven on Earth, right?”

Callahan’s longtime sonic home, the Chicago indie label Drag City – where he signed in the early 1990s – is one such community of care. Known for its artist-first ethos, the label has earned a cult following and a reputation as one of the last holdouts in an increasingly fractured music industry, having supported artists like Joanna Newsom, Silver Jews, Will Oldham, and Tortoise. Callahan tells me he feels as though he grew up alongside the label, and can’t imagine existing anywhere else.

“I feel like it’s my label,” he says. “I can do whatever the fuck I want on Drag City, you know? I could do literally anything I want to do. So, it’s just like running my own label.” It’s one of the purest expressions of artistic freedom you can hear in a working musician’s voice right now – not the fantasy of freedom, but the lived condition of it. In the face of streaming and AI, Drag City and Callahan produce physical ephemera that “sit in your memory differently”.

As I become aware of how long Callahan and I have been talking and how I do not want to run the risk of becoming a bore, I ask him if he has any plans to return to Australia. With nothing confirmed, I suggest perhaps a family holiday for his children to see kangaroos? And, for the adults who reside here, to see a singular voice that whilst completely consistent, holds worlds within worlds. One song from the hologram, containing an entire cannon. One writer of love songs, finding his beloved muse through lifetime, after lifetime, after lifetime.

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