the making of a river ain’t too much to love by smog - featuring bill callahan

Intro: 

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim.

Smog began in 1988 as the alias for Bill Callahan. Initially he released cassette recordings under his own label called Disaster. The debut Smog album, Sewn to the Sky, was released in 1990. After signing with Drag City, he released a series of albums in the 90s, including Forgotten Foundation, Julius Caesar, Wild Love, The Doctor Came at Dawn, Red Apple Falls and Knock Knock. In the early 2000s, he released Dongs of Sevotion, Rain on Lens and Supper. At this point, he was living in Chicago, and decided to move to Austin, Texas, where he began writing the songs for his 11th album. He wanted to abandon the Smog name and start releasing music under his own name but Drag City asked him to wait until the next record. A River Ain’t Too Much to Love was eventually released in 2005. 

In this episode, for the 20th anniversary, Bill Callahan reflects on how the album came together. This is the making of A River Ain’t Too Much to Love. 

Bill Callahan:  This is Bill Callahan and we are talking about A River Ain't Too Much to Love. Well, I was actually, I was talking to, right before I started talking to you, I texted my friend Connie, who played bass on the record. I was like, “What should I talk about?” (laughs). I mean, we'd been friends for years and years before making this record together and she knew me very well. She said like I was, I had become a different person with this different energy that she really wanted to be around. As if I'd made the sketch of who I wanted to be, but the record made it into flesh and blood.

Well, I would say recording the record was probably like at a time of one of the biggest transitions of my life, which was, I was living in Chicago and I really wanted to get out of there (laughs). Largely due to the winters, were absolutely unbearable for me. The gray skies, the lack of sunlight and all that. I'd lived, grew up on the East coast and moved to the West coast in my early twenties and I'd lived down south and a bunch of places and I'd passed through Austin two or three years before this record. And I really liked Austin a lot and I just started telling everybody that I was gonna move there and I was telling everybody that for a couple years and that I didn't wanna be the guy that was always talking about something that he never did. I was like, “Fuck, I gotta, I actually have to move to Austin even though I don't know anybody there.” And it felt like home to me, even just a little bit of time that I'd, the couple days that I had spent here. And so I finally did it and I knew one person, hardly at all. And I contacted him when I got to town and I was like, “Hey, I just moved here. Do you wanna like have a drink or something?” And he was like, “Well actually I'm moving, I'm moving like tomorrow to a different state.” And so I think I got together with him that night and then he left and I had knew absolutely nobody. But, so yeah, like I wanted to own my own house and have a yard and all this kind of thing that I'd never had, and Austin seemed like a place that I could afford to do that in 2004. And I also, musically, some big changes, like I wanted to stop releasing records under the name of Smog and just use my own name. Then this record was supposed to be the first record that I enabled that desire with, but my record label kind of got freaked out by the idea of, you know, all the years of putting the Smog name out there and that nobody would know who, what it was. And usually they have like zero interference in what I do and that's why I've been with them since, you know, for 30 years, is cause they just let me do whatever I want and I could give them like  Metal Machine Music or something and they would release it (laughs). Probably even literally if I gave Metal Machine Music, they would release it. But, so since they had been so accepting of all of my foibles in the past, I was like, “Okay, you really don't want me to change my name, so I'm not gonna do it,” but I got to do it, I told them, “I'm gonna do it on the next album so you have plenty of warning to get used to the idea and start promoting it however you want.” But the name change came first because my move, I had a lot of big plans from my move. I was, you know, like I said, I was gonna buy my first house and have my first yard and buy my first piano in the house. And I'm sure there were other firsts. So by leaving Chicago, I was leaving, I wanted to leave everything and start a brand new life. And that included getting, leaving Smog in Chicago, which I wasn't allowed to do for this one (laughs). But in my heart, Smog was gone and so that's how I approached the record.

There's that change. And also the way I play guitar started to change. I got into fingerpicking for the first time basically, and that really changed the shape of the songs. I think there's a big difference between strumming and fingerpicking, because when you're fingerpicking, there's a hole in the middle of music, I think, where the voice can sit. Whereas if you're strumming, the voice has to go on top and the strum goes beneath. So that, that really shaped why this record sounded really different for me. I mean, it was probably cause of Willie (Nelson), you know, and I was moving to Austin. I was like, “Okay, I gotta get a nylon string like Willie has, so I can fit in” (laughs). I didn't take any lessons. I think I just kinda messed around with it. Yeah, it's amazing what you can learn, how you can learn just by listening to other people play. And somehow, I mean, not even like watching them, cause that's a whole other way to, you can see what someone's fingers are doing. But just listening, I'm always amazed that like, I'm not a very musical person, I can't read music, I don't know about keys and all that, but if I listen to something enough, my brain just kind of like tells me eventually how to do it. It's strange, it's amazing (laughs). So yeah, I just messed around and tried to copy stuff and I did struggle, like, yeah, it was very hard to play my own songs, but I made them difficult so that I would have to learn. And now they don't seem difficult at all, but at the time they did. I did struggle to write these new songs just because I'd, like I said, I left everything behind, which maybe I was looking at that as an obstacle until I started looking at it as a stepping stone instead of an obstacle, you know? And I had forgotten that, yeah my mother had, I told her that I was having trouble writing and that I felt like I was just drifting or something like that. And she said that would be a good idea for a song. And that was how “Say Valley Maker” came to be, was just from that, the little image that she put in my head of someone floating down a river (laughs). 

"Palimpsest"

Well, the first song is called “Palimpsest,” which really just came from reading that word and not knowing what it meant and looking it up and loving that there was a word for that. So for anyone who doesn't know it's, on a document when you can see what old information has been erased with new information written on top of it, you can still see what the old notation or information was underneath it. And I saw that as a pretty good metaphor for like me moving, you know, moving to a different state and trying to become a new person. But I'm sure that like the erased pencil scribblings of me could still be seen underneath. 

I moved in the winter. I remember how beautiful the Austin, Texas winter was, especially that year, you know, it was clear blue sky every day and warm enough to sit in your backyard like without a shirt on (laughs). And that was definitely inspiration for “Palimpsest.” Another reason for getting a nylon string guitar was Mickey Newbury, who pretty much exclusively played nylon string. And that was around right when I was just discovering Mickey Newberry and I think “Palimpsest” in particular, I was kind of trying to write a song in his high poetic style that he has. Also his, a lot of his songs start with a nonverbal emoting, you know, he kind of either whistles or hums a melody and for like a minute and then he starts singing. I think I kind of tried to mimic that a little bit at the end of the song. Yeah it’s double guitar and it's not a fiddle, it’s this thing called a chanter, which is what people use to practice bagpipes, but without the bag, it's the reed instrument, but without the sack of air (laughs). It gives it that wailing sound. That kind of sounds like a harmonica or a fiddle. But yeah, it's also on the chanter is on, “Let Me See the Colts” and I don't know, I might have put it somewhere else too. “Palimpsest” as definitely always meant to be an opening song, and for the most part, that's how I write. I know where a song is gonna be in the sequence, even before it's finished. So, and that was definitely, “Palimpsest” was definitely gonna be the first song.

Well, the unique thing about this, another unique thing about this record (laughs), is that I took the band on the road for about maybe 10 shows or something right before, and we played the album before going to the studio. I started in Austin, I remember we went up to Portland and Arizona. Probably LA and I don't remember where all else, but, so by the time then we got back, and then I think we went in the studio the next day. I'd never done anything like that. And we were so goddamn ready, we tracked the whole thing in like a day and a half, like all the songs. And they were like, “Now what do we do?” But yeah, it really helped, helped speed things along. And also, most of the time that I go into a studio, the songs aren't really ready to be born yet, or they're right on the edge and kind of have to coax them out. And sometimes they kind of like preemies when they, the final version is like a preemie baby. It's very kind of fragile and that adds something definitely to it. You know, like that adds an energy, a fragility, and also just like a strength of trying to make up for the fragility. And then as, you know, once you start touring the songs, they become stronger and different and more fully fleshed out, and they often change, for better or worse, usually better. I think, over time, to the point where, I mean, I don't ever listen to my records, but I do know my songs from playing them. And I always think that if I do have to listen to an old record, I'm usually surprised at how different the songs, the recorded songs actually were, cause I've kind of grown and changed with the songs. But with the songs on A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, they had that growing period when we toured them before recording. And those songs, they don't ever seem to change.

“Say Valley Maker”

The record was recorded at down here, we call it, “Perdernales” (Pedernales) Studios, even though there's no R but you gotta say “Perdernales” in Spicewood, Texas, which is about 45 or so minutes outside of Austin, and it's very, the studio is on a, like a, I think it's a half golf course, an old country club that Willie (Nelson) bought, cause he wanted his own golf course (laughs). As everybody does. And yeah, every night there would be like so many deer that you'd have to, as you were leaving, avoid hitting Willie's deer. But there's also the town around it. Someone was showing me that there is kind of a housing community area that supposedly a lot of Willie's people lived in these houses just to be at the ready as soon as, if they need to go on tour. You know, so all of his touring guys and stuff lived in the same neighborhood near the studio is what I was told. And from the window of the isolation booth, if I'm remembering correctly, you can see Willie's ranch, which is not close, but it's down in a valley kind of you can see it. So I guess he could, he could keep his eye on his house while he was recording vocals (laughs). I mean, I think it was just a place that I'd heard about and I was like, “Now I can record here easily.” And I just wanted to go experience it for myself. The studio sounds great. They had a very unusual setup of having two, most studios have one mixing board where all the faders and all the sounds go into the mixing board, and that has a lot to do with the sound that you get on tape. This was the first studio I ever seen that had two mixing boards right next to each other, and they were using the preamps, I think of one, and then using the other board for all the other like EQ and controls and stuff. But that, whatever that mixing board that they're feeding everything through first, made everything sound instantly really nice. So in that way it made recording was quite easy.

Connie Lovatt came up with all these great bass lines. We struggled a lot, we had a strange thing with the bass guitar on this record. For some reason, the engineer, we tracked all the songs and he was like, “I don't know what's going on, but I can't hear the bass.” And I don't even remember what, it is still a mystery to me what was happening, but he just informed us that the bass was barely audible (laughs) and he couldn't do anything about it. Which, you know, seems like something an engineer should be able to take care of. I would say that Steve (Chadie), the engineer, he told me, well, he actually told my record label about like four or five days in to the sessions that, he was like, had no idea what was going on and that like, he just didn't know what to expect at any given moment. Which seems strange because we were just a trio, you know, it was bass and drums and I was playing guitar for the majority of the tracking. It was just that and with me singing, it was all live. And then I brought in, started bringing in some other people, you know, fiddle player and some extra percussion. And it didn't seem that crazy to me. It seems like it's the way I always do it. Like I lay down the core tracks live and then I bring in a few people to overdub. But for some reason the engineer was totally freaked out and confused by this. I don't know, maybe cause I had didn't tell him in advance or something. So people would just show up. But I'm not sure why he was so perplexed by what seemed like a very standard recording session to me.

Yeah, well “Say Valley Maker” was probably the first, it almost definitely was the first song I wrote for the record. Like I said, kicked off by a comment that my mother made when I told her about writer's block. My mom had just said something about a guy floating in the river and being moved by the currents, you know, which probably describes my mom's life more than it does mine (laughs). But I mean, I guess it wasn't a corpse, but I compared it to a corpse. Yeah it all just kind of spun off the image of someone floating down the river. And then really it just kind of, it told its own story. I just wanted something with all the elements in it. And kind of like exploding, like the Big Bang, has all the elements in it. I wanted it to have the fire and water and wood and stone, you know, kind of to be the big bang of the creation of the record.

It wasn't a conscious thing, in fact, I probably denied it for years. The fact that my Texas surroundings were influencing the music. I think it just took me a few years to realize that that was what was happening. But I definitely had a, you know, I’d been living in Chicago, which is a a stone fortress, and it's hard, you know, getting out into nature is, I found it very difficult in Chicago as compared to Austin, where at that time, in 2004, when I moved here, it felt like the city was, had been carved into nature. Usually I look at cities as these monolithic things that have no beginning or end, no edges. You know, it's just, it's a planet that you kind of can't escape everywhere you go. It's Planet Chicago or Planet New York. But in Austin, I felt like I could drive in any direction and before too long the city would just stop and there'd be grass and there'd be horses. Any direction I went, I ended up, the city would just like abruptly stop. It seemed like to me as a newcomer, when the city stops, there’d be fields with horses. And a lot of the bars and other businesses also had like dirt parking lots and dirt roads. You know, that's changed now that was 20 years ago. It's gotten a lot more like other cities now, but it still has, this protected area called the Greenbelt, goes right through the middle of the city. So no matter what part of town you live in, you're pretty close to the Greenbelt, which is just a big protected forested area with a, you know, water that is, sometimes dries up and sometimes full for swimming holes. And yeah, so I felt as if nature was the kind of the hand, and then Austin was like in the palm of the hand as a city, but it was still like I was surrounded by this stuff that was very easy to access. Just feeling how different it was here going in my backyard and there's all these hawks circling and you don't usually see that stuff unless you're in like Montana or something (laughs). 

Yeah, like getting Jim White to be the drummer, he is such an expressive drummer that he can be like a whole band because he can just fill those empty spaces with so much beauty. And I think the fingerpicking also enabled, you know, enabled him to be in full bloom.

“The Well”

Well, I think with “The Well,” the guitar part is pretty propulsive in parts, and I think that probably helped. I mean, especially if you compare it to something like, “Say Valley Maker,” which is, at least the first half of that song is very, it's just three or four notes in a, not a very particularly like, exciting way, but I think with “The Well,” it was, it felt more like a rockabilly song or something that could really get some slapping drums behind it. I think he just felt the propulsiveness of the guitar part and pushed that harder.

Well, with “The Well,” I started with the first line. I remember that, like I said earlier, that I was kind of having writer's block in my new life. So the first line is, “I could not work, so I threw a bottle into the woods,” and yeah, in my new house I had some woods behind my house and I couldn't work (laughs). That's how the song started. And then I just kind of, yeah, I guess in a lot of these songs I just kind of follow an image, you know? So “Say Valley Maker,” I just had the image of someone floating in the river on their back, and I just kind of followed it as if it was in my mind, you know? And then the same with “The Well,” I just follow the bottle. Okay, the guy threw the bottle and then now where's the bottle? And so he goes to look for the bottle and yeah, I think when you have the right image, it writes a song for you, you know, you just kind of have to follow it.

There's a reason why an image feels right, I think because it’s like a seed, you know, it has the, the whole tree in it. You just have to water it, watch it grow. And it's often the first, I often come up with either a title or the first line of a song. Those are the, once I get either one of those, that feels like a seed and the rest usually happens quickly and easily. 

Yeah, I was definitely listening to Johnny Cash around the time of the record. And “The Well” is in the way that “Palimpsest” is kind of a tribute to Mickey Newbury. I would say that “The Well” is a tribute to Johnny Cash. Yeah, definitely. 

Well, my voice was getting deeper in pitch with every record. It started to go back up again lately, but for a while it was going down, down, down with each record. And also, like I said earlier with the fingerpicking guitar instead of strumming, it leaves that center, big open space for a vocal to be, to sit in when you're mixing. So that probably, you know, contributes a lot to the fact that my voice is maybe more present than, more upfront than past records. And also nylon string guitar, nylon strings have much less, well, they're more muted. They don't have, I think they give off less frequencies, definitely less treble frequencies than a steel string guitar. And they're also, they have less sustain. I kind of got into the idea of most guitarists they want like sustain as like a big thing. They just want a note to ring out forever. But I was like, no, I want this note to die as soon as I hit it (laughs), so that like you can hear my vocal, you know? And definitely with fingerpicking a nylon string guitar, the note dies pretty quickly. So that's another reason why the vocal is, feels so present on this record.

“Rock Bottom Riser”

Oh yeah, the whole record is in one specific tuning. I forgot about that. Which definitely, it definitely gives a cohesiveness to the record because they're all in this tuning. And at the beginning of the first song, I think I strum, the first thing I do is just strum an open chord. And so that kind of introduces all the tones that are gonna be on the record in one sound. Yeah so it's a different tuning than standard and slightly lower. Now it's like the fourth string goes down half a step, I think, and then the fifth string is down a full step. And then, I don't remember if I dropped the E to a D or not. I probably did. The high E, I mean the low E. And maybe even the high E. I don't know, because that's how nowadays I almost always play a double drop D. Maybe I did that for the record. I probably did. Yeah I mean, using an alternate tuning was probably partially inspired by the fact that I was playing this nylon string guitar for the first time, which has, the neck is wider, so the strings are farther apart and I was fingerpicking. I think I was trying to make it a little easier on myself because you know, an open tuning can be a lot easier to play in because like I said, you can just not press any strings down and you've got a chord already. So I think I was just trying to make it a little easier, but also just wanted to go some places I hadn't been to before.

“Rock Bottom Riser,” I wanted to write a song that was completely unironic and just completely, I was wondering, “Can I write a song that is so straightforward?” No, like fancy footwork, (laughs), that just like says it like it is. And can it still be like compelling or interesting or will people want to hear it? And I thought if I could boil, you know, boil things down to really simple statements. “I love my mother, I love my father,” you know, just like these really simple statements. I was sure that it would work, you know, without trying to be fancy or distanced or even nuanced or anything. I just wanted to be like really straightforward.

I mean, I think with “Rock Bottom Riser,” I just, that was one of the ones that, well, I think the title came first and then the title, yeah, the title told the story to me and I just had to, I had to listen to the title and write it down. But where that phrase came from, I don't know. It just kind of popped into my head and I think I was also, with that song just trying to make sense of the, “oh fuck” moment when I got to Austin. I was like, “I don't know anyone here.” And I don't, I kind of needed to convince myself that I had done the right thing by writing these songs. There's the image of like a, a gold ring at the bottom of the river, which is obviously not like, that's imagery, it's not a literal thing like the rest of the song. Yeah, I just wanted to write it in the plainest words possible and see if it still had any dramatic weight to it.

Yeah, Joanna (Newsom) was just hanging out in the studio and she said, I guess it was after I'd done the basic tracking with the band, and then I went in to do overdubs with various people that were coming in. And hadn't really planned on having Joanna on the record, but she just said, she was listening back to everything that as we were doing other overdubs, and she said, “If I hear a piano part on one of these songs, do you want me to play it?” And I was like,
Sure.” And the only time like she popped up was on “Rock Bottom Riser.” She was like, “I think I hear something for that one.” So she went out and checked the piano, which is, it's actually Bobbie Nelson's piano, Willie's sister. She keeps it at, at the studio there.

I think with this record I was maybe becoming more forgiving or appreciative of my family and you know, my parents particularly. When you're in your early twenties, or when I was in my early twenties, and a lot of my friends who were in their twenties, you know, blamed a lot of things on their parents and on their upbringing, whether it's true or not. I got to a point where I hit this wall where I kind of realized that it doesn't matter. Maybe your parents didn't do the best thing for you. Maybe they did. It doesn't matter. You know, you're a grown ass person now, and you have the power to change, shape your life in whatever way you want it to, and it just seems like, in a way, like bagging on your parents is a, it's a good crutch to get you away from them. Cause if you think they're great, perfect, you know, then you don't wanna leave. Like, “I'm just gonna stay here. My parents are so cool.” So like, I think it's kind of natural to have, like, to be critical and that helps drive you out and gets you to do your, forge your own identity and do what you're supposed to do. So I think it's good to complain about your parents for a while, but then I think you have to, you can't make that your M.O., you know, you have to, you gotta leave that crutch behind. But hopefully by the time you hit 30, for me it was around 30. That's, I had to, I felt like I became a grownup when I was, when I had turned 30. Yeah so I’d just been thinking a lot about that stuff, that type of thing. Just it's not a good look to spend your, the whole, your entire life criticizing your parents. You gotta move on at some point. And I think that's one thing that was happening at around the time of the record.

“I Feel Like the Mother of the World”

“I Feel Like the Mother of the World,” well, strangely it came from, like the Israel, all the conflicts in the Middle East, you know, that have been happening for decades and decades are still happening now as. It's really come to the forefront now, but I just remember always hearing about those conflicts and it making me feel like a mother who wanted to separate two children. Yeah, it really, it just came from that. I always see things in family terms, you know, it's just the structure of the family structure is so applicable to the other structures in our lives, the other relationships. So it made sense to like weave the actual mother and children type of imagery into there also.

“I Feel Like the Mother of the World,” that one had a very, kind of a strange chord forming, I didn't make the best chord progression. And that's probably like why I hardly ever play that song live. And it was just a weird chord thing. I couldn't even remember how to play it now if I had to. But then, Thor Harris came in with his hammer dulcimer. Yeah, Thor Harris, he wrote me a letter. He didn't know that I'd moved to Austin. He wrote me a letter thinking that I lived in Chicago, I think, and said he'd made this resolution to just write to everybody, the musicians that he liked and offer in his services to play. So I didn't know, you know, I'd never heard of him, but he sent me this letter. I didn't know anyone in Austin, and I got this letter saying, “Hey, I love your music. If you ever need a drummer, let me know.” Then I wrote to him, I was like, “Actually, I just moved to Austin.” So I think I barely knew him at that point. But yeah, I was like, “Come add some percussion to the record.” And yeah, he brought the hammer dulcimer in, which was a huge part of the sound of the song. And thankfully it covered up my, totally masked my strange chord progression with a big, big clanging hammer dulcimer. So yeah, that's how that happened.

“In the Pines” 

“In the Pines,” I always loved that song, and I had tried to learn it in standard tuning. And it never, you know, I wanted to put my own mark on it, you know, like you're always supposed to do, with a cover version. But in traditional, in standard tuning, I couldn't, I don't know, I couldn't crack the song. It was just really kind of stifled and I wasn't adding anything to it. But then when I attempted it again in this new, you know, this alternate tuning that I was using for everything, all of a sudden I was playing it differently, just kind of feeling my way through the chords. Yeah and that really, it was just the different tuning, like totally gave me the space to make the song connect, you know, to make myself connected with the song.

I remember, I loved Mickey Newbury's version, which is, he turns it into this sort of just like a rocket ship blasting into space kind of song. Very kind of anthemic or something. I probably used his version of the words or something close to it. “In the Pines” is just one of those songs that is so mystical seeming and simple, but like just the richest imagery that seems to be, it's like, it's primeval. Could be from any, any point in human history really, you know, that or beyond, you know, sort of, it's like an elemental, the lyrics are elemental, just these building blocks, you know of, it's like a DNA of a human, kind of.

A lot of Texas artists have covered that song, and I always think it's a good idea to put a traditional song on a record. It's a kind of, it's a like a paying back, acknowledging of everybody that went before you, that I wouldn't be here if there weren't these traditional songs. Those are the seeds that all the other songs sprouted from, you know, so it, it always feels like an offering to the gods, kinda to put a song on there that was not written by me, and probably written, you know, shaped by hundreds of people until I got to hear it.

“Drinking at the Dam” 

For “Drinking at the Dam,” Connie and I just overdubbed some vocals. They had one of those tile echo chambers at the studio, which you see them less and less, but it's basically a room that they cover the walls and ceiling and floor completely in tile and they put a mic in the middle of the room and that's the sole function of the room is just to be a natural reverb. And that's where, you know, I think that's something like Fleetwood Mac on Tusk when they get those amazing like ethereal kind of backing vocals that seem to have no body, it's just all soul or something. Or it's like pure, it's pure spirit kind of or something. And so smooth and dreamy. I think what they're using on Tusk is probably a tiled, reverb chamber. And that's because it's analog, you know, it's not, it's true. It's actual reverb. It's not made by a machine. It's just the sounds bouncing all over these tile walls. And so, yeah, I was trying to steal a little bit of that Tusk magic for “Drinking at the Dam.”

I was again thinking about war and that's a lot of the imagery is just from that, the futility of fighting wars and just that interesting thing of like people, kids or teenagers, like going to strange places to kill a 12-pack. You know, like all those weird places that kids hide so they can be alone and drink some beers with their friends. And of course the dam is like pretty potent image itself.

“Drinking at the Dam,” I think it started with, I think the first image that I got was the, “skin mag,  skin magazine and the brambles.” I remember when I was a kid, like that was kind of a thing would be, cause you know, I would go exploring woods and creeks and stuff, and there was always, like, I was often like a girly magazine just out (laughs). I mean, if I found one now, I would be like disgusted and run as you know, now that I know, like just what, what people use those magazines for. But at the time, I didn't quite, you know, prepubescent, so like, I didn't really quite know what they were all about, but I found myself like, yeah, I would always see like pages of that just like scattered around and that stuck with me.

“Running the Loping” 

Well, the waltz time has always, it's always fascinated me. I think there's something, there's something kind of, I don't know if it's healing about 3/4 time or it seems to be really engaging. It's an engaging time signature, I think. Because even if you're not waltzing when you're listening to it, it does make your brain waltz with the thoughts and the feelings of the music. And I do think, you know, because it was, waltzing was in the past, like a big way of how people got together and hooked up and got to know each other, you know, would be at these dances where the songs were all in waltz time. I do think there's kind of a vestigial feeling of connecting or yeah, of like seduction almost, and hope for love. So whereas something 4/4 time is more, it's more of a presentation that doesn't necessarily court, I mean, it's almost in the title 3/4 and 4/4, but 3/4 it's like, “Oh, something's missing (laughs). And that's me, you know, that's my engagement or that's my, I'm missing.” But 4/4, there's nothing missing. It's a perfect equation of one, but 3/4 is like three quarters. So it needs the person to listen to it. And you are the, you are the one that makes the three into the four that makes the song complete, I think.

Well, I think “Running the Loping,” I was, as part of my big life change, you know, my 180 degree change of buying a house with a yard and all that stuff. And I was also hoping to like, like, get married, settle down, you know, have kids. That wouldn't happen for a long time after that. But it was also running. I've been a runner off and on in my life, but I picked it up again in Austin and I think, I thought if I wrote a song about running that I would be forced to stick with it (laughs), cause I was basically telling the world that I'm a runner. So I think that the song started from just, it just came from the idea of running, I think.

I'm trying to remember what the other lyrics are. I remember the stuff about the “dropping matches into a wet glass,” and “the pornography of my past.” I don't remember how the song ends. Yeah, I mean, I think the idea, now that you remind me of the lyrics, which I'd forgotten to “Running the Loping,” probably cause I can, I used to perform that song, but I haven't done it for at least 10 years. So that's why the lyrics have probably, are eluding me. But yeah, I was just kind of trying to find a, offer a different way of looking at life. Like saying like, “Every day doesn't have to be, every day isn't gonna be perfect, but maybe every other day is, and that's, that's enough.”

“I’m New Here”

“I'm New Here,” that started because I was very, when I was new to Austin, I was very grateful and impressed by the highway structures here that I hadn't encountered in other parts of the country. I think they might have been, I’ve since discovered, in Louisiana. So every, there's the highway and there's the frontage road, and then the highway goes over, you know, it's on stilts, The frontage road, you can go left or right, like every other frontage road in the country, but there's a third option you can just turn around and make a U-turn. So if you weren't supposed to have got off, usually if you get off at the wrong highway exit, you have to go on the frontage road until the next on ramp. But in Texas, every off ramp has an immediate U-turn thing that you can do. And being new to Austin, I was making, you know, making a lot of wrong, I was still finding my way around the city. So I was very grateful for this, these quick turnarounds that you can make instead of having to go all the way to the next on ramp and then to the next, once you get on, you have to go to the next exit and then turn around, you know? So yeah, I just saw it in that as, “no matter how far along you've gone, you can always turn around,” is the lyric. And again, like referencing my move from Chicago to Austin, or hopefully not just about me, but anybody's big move in life, you know. That's how the song started with just putting that, the turnaround ramp into the song.

Well for, “I'm New Here,” we actually had, we, on the tour that we did leading up to the recording, we did have a band arrangement that was actually was pretty great, but something happened in the studio. I was having trouble. It's a two string guitar part. For some reason I was having trouble playing it with the band. I just kept messing it up. So I was like, “Well, let me just try it by myself and then maybe you guys can add your parts later.” So I just did it by myself and I just liked, it felt really cool to have a two string guitar song (laughs), and it sounded, you know, real different from the rest of the LP. So I just decided to, I don't think they even tried to overdub their parts onto it. It's just my ineptitude of not being able to, I don't know, sometimes when you play something, it's easier to play by yourself cause you don't, it's a lot freer, cause you can, it's looser so you can kind of mess up a little bit. And it sounds like it's part of the song, but not if you're with a band.

I got a letter in the mail from Richard Russell, who runs XL Records, and he produced the Gil Scott-Heron record, and he just told me that they wanted to cover, “I'm New Here.” It's funny that he wrote me a letter. I mean, the internet was in existence at the time, 2004, but for some reason Richard chose to write a letter, which was very cool, I thought. Yeah, I really couldn't believe that Gil Scott-Heron was gonna cover it (laughs). 

Well, an interesting thing about this record that really pleases me was that I found out that Sarah Silverman is a, loves this record, and she like tweeted about it a long time ago, and then I think it was last year, she tweeted again. She was like, “The record of the year is, once again, A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, even though, you know, it was like 20 years since the record came out, but I thought that was pretty cool.

“Let Me See the Colts”

“Let Me See the Colts” was, I wanna say that that song started with the guitar riff. Which is unusual for me to start a song with a guitar riff, but it's just like the sliding up the neck thing that I'd never done before. And it sounded really different from any other song I'd recorded. The title, actually the title probably came before the guitar riff. Really just, that phrase, “let me see the colts,” popped into my head and I was just like, “What could that possibly mean? (laughs). Let me try to find out.” And yeah the story was in that weird sentence.

I mean, I think I was trying to end the record on a, with a little bit of hope, and it's about a guy waking up too. I'm always, I think I write about waking up a lot. I'm just always fascinated about the way living things go to sleep and wake up and have a new, the world goes to sleep and goes black and wakes up and it never fails to just fascinate me. That we have this kind of second chance every, every day to start again. So I think I was just, yeah, just thinking about that. I always think about that like pretty much every day and every night.

Well, I mean, I remember the record came together so quickly. We tracked, basic tracking, it was a day and a half, which is very quick for me. And like I said, after this record, I started recording under my own name and I think I owe that confidence to how A River Ain’t Too Much to Love came out, kind of gave me the belief that it's okay to change the name and change the way I play. It’s definitely a landmark record for me, I think in my development as a musician. I mean, it does seem to be a lot of people's favorite record of mine, and I think, you know, it might even be my favorite record of mine. It's definitely the most, it's just so cohesive and it's kind of a, like a power trio record. It all just hangs together so nicely and nothing seems forced or labored over. And it's got, like I said, it's cohesive. It has like one sound that is very clear and simple and light, you know, it's got, it has a lightness, a springiness to it, partially because the bass was like fucked up. And maybe that was a blessing in disguise. Like, it isn't like a deep booming bass sound to it. It's all very light. Just because that's all the bass sound we could get out of the recording. And it reminds me of, it's clear, like a river or like some rivers. It's a very like, clear sounding record to me. Yeah, definitely like the most of a piece thing that I've done without trying to be of a piece, it just kind of, it all hangs together so nicely without even trying.

We've been talking about my record, A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, which everybody agrees is my best record of all time and even I like it (laughs).

Outro:

Dan Nordheim:

Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Bill Callahan. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase A River Ain’t Too Much to Love. Instrumental music by Love Axe. Thanks for listening.

Credits:

"Palimpsest"

"Say Valley Maker"

"The Well"

"Rock Bottom Riser"

"I Feel Like the Mother of the World"

"In the Pines" (traditional)

"Drinking at the Dam"

"Running the Loping"

"I'm New Here"

"Let Me See the Colts"

All songs by Bill Callahan

except “In the Pines” (traditional)

© & ℗ 2005 Bill Callahan

Your/My Music (BMI)

Recorded at Pedernales in Spicewood, TX in Nov. 2004

Bill Callahan: vocal, guitars, various instruments

Connie Lovatt: electric bass, vocal

Jim White: drums

Plus:

Thor Harris: zills (Say Valley Maker), hammer dulcimer and air drum (I Feel Like the Mother of the World)

Joanna Newsom: piano (Rock Bottom Riser)

Travis Weller: fiddle

Engineered by Steve Chadie

Mastered at Abbey Road by Nick Webb

I Feel Like the Mother of the World was mixed with Chris “Frenchie” Smith in the Bubble in Austin, TX

Produced by Bill Callahan

Episode Credits: 

Intro/Outro Music:

“Puddle” by Love Axe, from the album, Optimism Paranoia Desperation Abolition

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam